Narodnaya
by Marquis Carabas
Summary: Long and illustrious careers can lead where you least expect them. And for Coraline, Wybie, and Maria, it can lead to a challenge beyond anything yet faced.  An sequel to 'Wells Street Station' and 'The Ellipse'.
1. Stormfront

**Disclaimer: I'm a messy-haired male writer from the vicinity of the British Isles, but that's as far as any connection to Neil Gaiman goes. Hence, I don't own Coraline in book, film, or any other form.**

**This follows on and concludes other stories I've published on this site; "Wells Street Station", "Promenade", and "The Ellipse", in chronological order. If you haven't read those, then this will certainly be terribly confusing. **

**As always, any constructive criticism will be gratefully accepted and considered.**

* * *

><p><em>'Some say the world will end in fire,<br>Some say in ice.  
>From what I've tasted of desire<br>I hold with those who favor fire...'  
><em>-Robert Frost_  
><em>

* * *

><p>The stormy season was setting in.<p>

Thunder broiled in a sky the colour of pitch, threaded through with rippling lightning. Winds howled, lashing across trees and buildings and sending sheets of slashing rain flying almost parallel to the ground, overflowing gutters and sending rivers spilling down narrow streets. Smaller, sharper gusts struck like assassins, rocking trees and sending the few pedestrians swaying.

Luckily, from Coraline's perspective, it was all taking place outwith a solid set of walls, where the wind came as only a dulled whistle and the rain as a persistent rattling on the windows of her office. And considering the nature of her office, it was only really for the best that the storms admitted inside stayed metaphorical.

"The city's emergency services'll be run off their feet tonight," she said, pushing aside a heavy green curtain to pore out at the rushing blackness. She was seated in a dark leather rotating chair, behind a heavy wooden desk plastered with papers and odds and ends, the desk's semi-organised chaos at a contrast with the rest of the room's ordered symmetry.

"They've been anticipating it for a while after the dry spell. They've taken precautions. Sent out warnings," said a young man, Coraline's secretary, leaning against the whitewashed wall at the room's other side, shifting through several papers. "TV broadcasts and fliers and ethernet sendings, just to be sure people get the message."

"I can tell it's paid off," said Coraline, regarding distant and nigh-indiscernable lines of vehicle headlights, some running along the ground, others stitching across the sky. "You are driving in a _storm_, you _idiots_."

"Beg pardon?"

"Just talking to people more than half a mile away. As you do." Coraline closed the curtain and swivelled back round to the front, clasping her hands together on the desk. "What exciting things are going to give me fresh grey hairs tonight, Mr Moloney?"

"A couple of reports," said the secretary, moving forwards to spread the papers in front of Coraline. "There's one here from – ah, Mr Lovat..."

Coraline smiled briefly, absently rubbing her left ring finger, where she wore an unadorned ring of grey iron.

"It's regarding developments in the chemo-structural study section of the Centre for Sur-real Research." Moloney scrutinised the bound papers. "I won't pretend I understand half the words he uses, or that I can even pronounce them, but he seems excited. When he's not using terrifying equations, he's using underlining. And exclamation marks."

"Keep it on the desk and I'll go over it later," said Coraline. "I'll decipher it. Somehow. What else?"

Moloney went through more papers, in exacting detail for several when Coraline pressed him. She kept up the same pose all the while, arms folded in front of her and elbows resting on the desk, her sharply-pointing nose resting on the top of her linked hands.

She wore a sober, dark suit of a clasped jacket and a long skirt, which was the only thing sober or normal about her appearance. Her hair, which fell to her upper back, was a deep shade of blue. Her right eye was covered by a eyepatch, below which an angled, discoloured scar ran, ending at the corner of her mouth. The rest of her heart-shaped face was similarly worn, with premature lines grooved in her eye corners and forehead and small notches and scars running here and there along her jawline and cheeks. Two older, longer ones ran parallel across her left cheek.

Considering her occupations and lifestyle, Coraline, who was in her mid-forties, felt she wasn't doing too badly.

"And the last?"

"This is the more unusual of them," said Moloney. "It got passed along from Defence, who didn't know what to make of it. They thought it deserved your … unique insight."

Coraline picked it and read through, her brow creasing and her remaining eye narrowing as she did.

"An entire military warehouse in Massachusetts cleaned out?" she said in disbelieving tones. Moloney nodded.

"Just last night, and they spent all of that time trying to puzzle it out. I can't blame them," said Coraline, her frown turning quizzical. "No disturbances, no footage picked up of anyone accessing the warehouse from the outside, no signs of the gear – including, amongst the staples, rocketry, armoured vehicles, and loaned experimental items, _joy_ – being taken out." She read on, putting her arduously acquired speed-reading to best use and noting every detail she could. "All security equipment and recorders in the building inexplicably shorted out at the same time. No possibility of the disappeared gear being stored elsewhere in the base, and less than zero possibility of it being taken outside the base without _someone_ noticing. And not a single eyewitness to whatever actually happened inside the warehouse. Which, for the record, had been kitted out with all the best security and safeguards the military has to offer." She held the paper before her and leaned back in the chair, fixing a thousand-yard stare on the ceiling.

"And they send to me, specifically, with all possible emphasis – because they think that Sur-real involvement could be the only other explanation for something like this happening."

"It could well fit," said Moloney. "That's one of the few areas in which they concede that security may have been deficient. Mostly because, well, it had never really been regarded as an area in which something like this might happen."

Coraline kept up the thousand-yard stare.

"And of course," she said, in a voice as cold and smooth as sunken glass. "It had better not turn out to be the result of Sur-real involvement. Because I'm reasonably sure that an act like this, if a psychephage bore responsibility or was involved, would be a _severe_ breach of the Concord."

Moloney shifted from foot to foot. Coraline let the chair fall and turned back to business.

"Immediate response is being handled by...?"

"The usual agencies are tackling the media fallout. And I imagine that army command's going to try and find a few heads to let roll for this. Depending on how panicky they get, it probably won't be the right heads."

"All the more reason for me to get involved then," said Coraline, a tone of anticipation entering her voice as she stood upright suddenly, adjusting her jacket. "This is the sort of exciting I prefer. Tell any anxious callers regarding this that I'm taking a personal interest. And I want you to make a few phonecalls."

"To whom?"

"I want you to call my husband and fill him in. He'll be in the Residence. Don't worry about security, he's got special clearance for matters like this. Call Secretary Ortega and just make sure the Department of the Supernatural's fully appraised as well. They'll both want to tackle this, whatever it proves to be."

"Righto," said Moloney, moving towards the phone on the desk as Coraline walked away from the desk, swinging her arms back and forth. She stopped briefly to take a brimmed cap from where it lay next to a few photographs of her wedding, placing it squarely on her head.

"Gods," she breathed. "It's great to get away from that thing for just once in a while. National security breaches should happen more often if I get to do this. And make one more phone call before the others, a short one."

"To...?"

"To the Eroder team here in the building," said Coraline, moving to the door. "I'm going to pay the Ambassador a visit about this, and I want to be sure it's all ready to go."

Moloney dialed a short number, spoke lowly and briefly, and then looked up and nodded. "It's good to go. Have fun, Madam President."

"I intend to," said Coraline, moving out the room as two dark-suited agents fell into step behind her.


	2. Parlance

"It's all ready for you, Madam President," said one of the two technicians standing outside a nondescript door in the White House's East Wing. They both stood to something approximating attention as Coraline neared.

"Thank you," she said, reaching for the brass door handle and twisting it open. "Hopefully, this shouldn't take too long." The two Secret Service agents took up positions on either side of the door, one of them muttering something into an mouthpiece. The technicians closed the door behind her as she stepped through.

The room was nondescript. A relatively small cuboid of carpeted floor, muted colours, and pale walls given a slight depth by the light of a gas-lantern on a table at the centre. An Eroder, capable of loosening the boundaries separating reality from Sur-reality, was set into the ceiling and purring quietly away.

Once she was in, she breathed out, allowing for a moment to settle herself, wishing, as always, that she had a ferroshot-loaded weapon at hand. For peace of mind if nothing else.

Even after the many times she'd done this particular chore, it was still hard for her to be in a Sur-real atmosphere and not feel as though something would try and kill her. And it _was_ a palpable atmosphere. The air had the subtle scent of honeysuckle to it, a smell slowly recognised over many excursions. There was a slight buzz that almost seemed to heighten and intensify emotions. The light seemed lighter. The shadows seemed darker.

The room was currently empty. Coraline slouched against a wall and waited, studiously watching the dancing flame within the bell-shaped lantern.

And after a few moments, the air at the other end room seemed to breath, and a gentle, sing-song voice said "My pardon for my tardiness, Lady Stormcrow. What service may I render you?"

The Ambassador, after a moment's studied rudeness, had arrived out of some fold in space accounted for by the most convoluted of Wybie's mathematics. Coraline stood upright and looked up.

The Ambassador, the representative of the Sur-real to her government, was a beldam; desire-eating, spider-bodied, with the upper body of a woman and gleaming buttons in place of eyes. Her own buttons were a glossy black, and the metal for her limbs was dark and dull. Up past her lower body of black chitin, she wore a simple vest of some dark, quilted material. Her black hair ran flat down her head and neck until it reached her shoulders, at which point it devolved into a solid block of frizzle. Her mouth was formed into a permanent semi-circle, a gleaming smile of white shark teeth.

She stepped forward, her leg-tips digging into the carpet, the fine china cup and saucer in her metal grasp clinking slightly as she moved. It was a mannerism the Ambassador constantly affected that baffled Coraline, not least because of the cup always being empty. Her button-eyes gleamed and fixed intently on Coraline, and her smile stayed wide.

"I've asked you not to call me that, Ambassador," said Coraline quietly. "I prefer to be called 'President Jones'."

"Once more, and likely always, my pardon," said the Ambassador smoothly. "You must forgive us if the old titles have a way of keeping a hold."

"I'd prefer that you loosened them," said Coraline curtly. This particular duty bothered her, and she wanted it done. "In any case, I have questions for you."

"My knowledge is at your disposal, President Jones. What are your questions?" The Ambassador raised the cup and sipped at the brim, extending her little finger daintily, her eyes catching the lantern's golden light.

Coraline stepped forward, keeping her body language casual, placing herself on the other side of the gas lantern to the Ambassador. "One of our military bases in Massachusetts has been … well, plundered. Stripped bare of weaponry. With no obvious avenue for human involvement."

"Massachusetts," purred the Ambassador, one finger tapping against her saucer reflectively. "Ragged-Ocean-running-into-Grassland-running-into-Mountains on this landmass. It rings clear and – I feel I have the notion of the base you refer to . Rich with life, a place that has felt many souls pursuing duty, though I have not the scent or image of those who hunt there." The tapping ceased, and the Ambassador's expression very carefully didn't change. "Though, of course, none now hunt under the Concord. That cannot be done now."

The Concord.

It was one thing to be preyed upon by predators of emotion, to lose loved ones to those who lurked in old places and took souls to feed themselves, and to never know why they had gone missing.

It was quite another to know_ why_ they were missing.

Nearly twenty years ago, the then-tiny and mistrusted Department of the Supernatural had inadvertently revealed in spectacular fashion the existence of the Sur-real and the predators within, the psychephages. There had, not surprisingly, been no little initial shock. Then a great deal of interest. And then, as people still continued to vanish, a rising anger. Coraline and her troubleshooters, and those in similar departments formed in other nations, found their workload escalating steadily for twelve years as more and more cases were reported and more and more psychephages found.

And those twelve years came to an abrupt end when, quite unexpectedly, psychephages found by troubleshooters started pleading for peace. A few particular cases stood out, and in time, the strangest imaginable diplomatic missions took place. Meetings were arranged in Sur-real lairs and in points set up with Eroders, where a few pyschephages would bargain to stop their kin's extermination.

And so they'd reached the Concord. The work of the troubleshooters would stop. In return, the pyschephages would stop feeding and killing when they did so. And to ensure this, the work of one of the sub-departments within the United States Department of the Supernatural had laboriously unearthed a way of breaking down and synthesising, in liquid form, the matter consumed by psychephages. Sufficient quantities of it would be left in a few key locations at regular intervals, to be taken and distributed as needed. And, as an extra surety, heads of state and a few global organisations would retain psychephage go-betweens.

Coraline had been surprised at the turn of events, but hadn't objected. The important thing, she had thought, was that no more feeding would be done.

And she still thought that, albeit tempered with the sanity-preserving spite that at least _then_ she didn't have to handle the bulk of actually treating with the damn Ambassador.

"Can I infer that the fact that the matter is mentioned – and that human interference is outruled - means that you suspect that my kin were involved?" said the Ambassador, sipping again at the cup.

"_Were_ psychephages involved?" asked Coraline, her tone brooking no evasion.

"Alas, I cannot say. I do not know what hunts at the base, or indeed if anything still hunts there." The Ambassador shrugged an elegant shrug. "Perhaps one of the kin was involved in this grand theft, but I can confess to no knowledge. If they were, they would certainly be acting outwith the terms of the Concord. And by the Concord, a legitimate target for reprisal by human forces."

Coraline gazed into the button eyes, which gazed back, betraying nothing.

"There will be a full investigation of the base," said Coraline. "If there turns out to be psychephage involvement, then we will take proper action."

"That is your right."

"Action escalated to the scale of psychephage involvement. If you _do_ have any information, however minor, now's the time to unburden yourself."

"One may only unburden oneself of nothing by replacing it with something." The Ambassador's lip corners jerked, self-congratulatory at the turn of phrase. "Should I acquire information relevant to this, then it would of course be my duty as an ally to your government to share it."

"As an ally of my government, you should take pains to seek it out."

"There are favours I can call in," said the Ambassador, after a pause, another sip, and a shrug. "I know of other kin in the cities and dwellings of that region. I can investigate the base's lair when the chance arises. You need not work entirely alone."

"I don't need to, no," said Coraline. "Your knowledge on this was all I came for. If there's nothing else, we can close this meeting now."

"Then let it be closed. My thanks for your company and questions, Lady – President Jones," said the Ambassador, with a slight incline of her head, her smile as fixed and still as a statue's.

* * *

><p>"That is <em>my<em> chair." Coraline addressed those words to one of the two people sitting in the Oval Office when she returned.

"And rest assured, you have superb taste in chairs," said Wybie, reclining back in it at a ridiculous angle, resting his feet on the desk.

"And I'm not so up to date on my reading of the Constitution, but I'm pretty sure the Third Article prescribes putting your feet on the Resolute Desk as a capital offense."

"That's what _I_ said," said Maria, seated on one of the two sofas framing the room's centre, a briefcase in hand.

"You're the least fun President ever." Wybie pulled back, lowering his feet and standing up with a satisfied groan. He stood tall in the room, six-and-a-half feet, and scratched a hand through his short and thick growth of grey-speckled beard, his dark green eyes wrinkled at the edges with amusement. "Just as well you've got me to provide a good counterbalance of _joie de vivre_."

"Didn't I outlaw _joie de vivre_? Remind me to get around to it," said Coraline, seating herself and putting her feet up on the desk. "So. You've both been filled in?"

"On the details, yes," said Maria. Her serious expression was framed by shoulder-length dark hair and accented by darker eyes behind round spectacles. "I assume that military warehouses don't automatically clear themselves out without warning as a matter of course."

"A safe assumption. And they think the Sur-real may well be involved in the clearout. Which is where -"

"_Poss_ibly," allowed Maria. "A military base would be a perfectly good place for high-running emotions. It could already have an established adjacent Sur-real lair, complete with psychephage to actually carry it out."

"Add to that that the Sur-real is effectively infinite, along with the potential size of the lairs inside it, and you'd certainly have no problems storing the equipment there." Wybie's eyes had brightened, and he seemed to be looking around for paper and a pencil. "You'd have problems with non-insulated integrated electronics, of course, but that probably wouldn't be a problem from a pyschephage's perspective, depending on its purpose…"

"So it's theoretically possible for a psychephage to be involved?" asked Coraline, shoving the conversation away from any possible tangent while she could.

"For one, in theory, to emerge from its lair in an emotion-saturated real environment, take items from there to the Sur-real, and leave military command scratching their heads? Yes." Maria frowned. "Though that would leave the question of _why_."

"Argergeist? Frustration-eater?" suggested Coraline. "There'd be a great deal of frustration floating around after something like this."

"Not to put too blunt an edge to the point," said Wybie dubiously, "but most argergeists we had to deal with couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a map, let alone pull something like this off. In a coalition, maybe, and with possibly another psychephage pulling the strings, but that's assuming a great deal of intricacy…"

"Then let's get more evidence before we begin to guess what's gone on," interjected Coraline.

"I'll make sure the Department prioritises this," said Maria determinedly. "I'll take a personal interest, and I'll accept the First Gentleman's assistance as a semi-independent consultant, if he's willing…"

"He is indeed," assured Wybie. "This sounds fun. I mean, it's obviously a calamitous breach of national security that cannot be repeated, but still. _Fun_."

Coraline regarded them over her steepled fingers. Then she absently picked a piece of paper off the desk, scanned through it, tapping on it with her finger several times, doing her best to burn a hole in it with her gaze throughout.

She looked up again at Wybie and Maria, her expression calm and even. "You know, I think I might take a personal interest as well."

"Wait, what?" chorused Wybie and Maria. Their gazes flicked to each other, and Maria won whatever brief battle of wills took place. "You're going to get involved in the investigation?"

"It's been six months since I took a vacation," said Coraline casually. "My schedule's relatively open in the next few days. I might go up to Massachusetts. Visit a military base. Poke around. Wallow in nostalgia. Possibly avoid death at something's claws. The usual."

"Oh God," muttered Wybie after a few minutes, "Director Hawkwood's going to _love_ this."

"The Director of the Secret Service is an experienced man and understands the unorthodox practises sometimes resorted to by those in government. I'll be obliged to plan it with him anyway, and he'll be open to reason."

"He's also _scary_."

"Leave him to me. And come with me," urged Coraline. "Come with me as well, Maria, and take some of the Department with you. Hopefully, bouncing some of the brightest minds regarding the Sur-real off each other might avail something."

Wybie nodded, and Maria carefully considered Coraline, the ghost of a smile approaching her features. "All three of us. Just like the old days?"

"That's the idea," said Coraline, the lines around her mouth edging upwards and the corner of her remaining eye creasing. "With added scars, motorcades, and agents who make unhappy noises if you do anything at all dangerous or fun, of course, but you can't have everything."

* * *

><p>It was a hour or so later, and there were just a few items left before she'd raise the idea with the Secret Service.<p>

One more in the series of communiques between the USA and the Luna colonies, hammering out the fine print for a visit from their governor. Out past her windows, still battered by the rain and wind, and slipping through the briefest of gaps in the cloud wall, Coraline could just about make out the lights from the largest settlements on Luna's surface. Out there, as yet unseeable, there'd be similar, smaller lights from Mars.

Her signature for a bill signed unanimously by both Houses, approving the next transfer of goods and funds to the nations still trying to recover from the Grey Plague. Some nations had all but vanished beneath it, and other nations had been crippled, and all at least scarred, and any that were left standing had banded together in the face of all history to help the recovery. Humanity had realised where its priorities lay, and it only took an epidemic beyond estimating to finally do it.

Coraline briefly felt good about her job as she helped pass along another small part of the recovery process, a feeling which then vanished as the next parts leapt up at her from her desk.

Some young member of Congress had been caught in a compromising position with at least (those two words were emphasised) five other people, none of whom were their wife. Coraline wished the Press Office and the congressman's re-election campaign much joy with this one, and moved on.

A new shadowy group called the Tantibalic Tendency was rising in prominence in the reports from the Department of Homeland Security, along with assurance that they were as yet contained, which inspired the grumpy thought in Coraline that in her young day, the terrorists had at least had sensible names. She checked it over, making sure she had the details down as pat as she could, and moved on.

A few invitations to speak at official events. More suggestions from her Press Office to take up some of these invitations. The details for upcoming state visits from the English, Australian, and Egyptian Presidents, and the itinerary for her own as-yet distant state visit to the Republic of China.

And then, with that, her evening admitted a brief moment of freedom.

She phoned the building's service office, asked for Hawkwood to come over, and reclined in her chair as she waited.

After a while, Director Hawkwood knocked and entered.

"Glad you could make it, Director," said Coraline. "Please sit down. No, really, you may want to sit down."


	3. Passage

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Rylski speaking. I'd just like to inform you that the plane has entered a rough patch, so we can expect to experience some minor turbulence. For anyone in distress, there are bathrooms and medical suites with airsickness tablets on each level of the craft, and we also advise that you take advantage of the blinds on your windows. The lightshow outside can get distracting."

"You have to admit, getting your own plane's a good perk of the job," said Wybie, looking with a rapt expression out of his window to where a bolt of lightning had just struck across one of the fixed wings on his side, streamers of electricity coursing harmlessly across the ablative plating and grounding itself. The aircraft's heavy insulation reduced the clap of the impact outside to a mere breath, the tumult in the night sky to a bare whisper.

"Uh huh," said Coraline distractedly, holding a pen in her mouth while she reviewed the details on the Massachusetts base, supporting her electronic pad with one hand and flicking through virtual pages with the other.

"Mind you, you've got a lot of good perks," Wybie continued. "You get a plane. You can pardon turkeys. You get to appoint cabinet officials."

"Joy."

"Don't knock it. All I've got is the Chief Floral Designer."

"And for what it's worth," said Maria, likewise watching the storm, "Thanks to your wise appointment, the floral decorations around the White House have never been shapelier, better arranged, or more pleasing to the eye."

"Wait a minute. You're not being _sincere_."

"Be fair to yourself," said Coraline. "You can also act as the White House host. You can arrange functions and social events."

"And what happened the last time I tried to exercise that power?"

"No lasting damage was done, and that's the important thing," said Maria.

"Sometimes, I think I may be in a role far beyond my abilities to properly deal with, and a growing worm of insecurity and self-doubt begins gnawing at my soul," said Wybie. "But then I use science to accidentally make something explode, and it's all better."

They were some thousands of feet above Vermont, pitching slightly in the winds crashing across them. This particular Air Force One was a sturdy model, its wide body packed to the gunwales with mechanised and electronic safety systems, in addition to the dozens of other facilities that were hosted on any respectable presidential aircraft.

"Madam President?" There was a knock at the door of the study they were currently ensconced in, and it opened to admit Secret Service Director Nicolas Hawkwood, an angular and athletic man who had the bearing of a panther, the eyes of a sharpshooter, and the emotional variance of a Botox-overdose victim. "We'll make landfall in thirty minutes, twenty minutes' drive away from the base. The detail's been arranged to escort you there."

"Thank you, Mr Hawkwood."

"And once again, ma'am," he pressed on, "I'll have to ask you not to make their jobs harder than they need to be by making unnecessary detours, arguing with people on the street, or trying to spilt off from the detail."

"I did apologise and promise not to do it again the last time."

"Indeed. And the times before that as well." Hawkwood's expression didn't change, which it wasn't wont to doing in any case. "I'll need your word of honour this time, ma'am."

"You have it," said Coraline wearily. "I won't have much chance to get away anyway. I'll just be going to the base and back, and I'll keep the detail by myself and these two at all times."

"That's all I wanted, Madam President. Landfall in twenty-nine minutes," said Hawkwood, making his leave through the same door. Wybie absently watched him go.

"You really should give him a pay-rise, considering the sort of things you put him through," said Wybie. "How many other Presidents nearly pick a fight with a heckler?"

"Andrew Jackson fought duels like they were going out of fashion," said Coraline. "Recall also that the heckler called me a … what was the term? A 'menopausal cyclops', I think. And that I was going to Hell for consorting with evil forces."

"And it's to my lasting shame that I wasn't there to stop the agents preventing you from throwing a punch, but still."

"Let _them_ have faced off with three phylaxii in the Sacrada Familia," muttered Coraline, tapping at the band for the eyepatch. "That'll have shown them a damn cyclops."

_A running length of corridor, chattering shadows dancing ahead of her, her gun levelled, the footsteps of the Spanish department behind her. _

_Rounding a corner, the shadows melting and unspooling before her, a figure of pure blazing white suddenly lashing itself together from the disparate strands of shadow-matter._

_A sword forming in its hand, flames in a whirlwind around the blade, slashing out in an impossibly fast blur before she could duck, cutting off sight with an explosion of echoing noise and tearing pain, more white figures appearing and gunfire chattering as she pitched forward…_

She shook herself out of the memory, focusing herself back onto more relevant matters. She'd have the chance to relive the good old days soon enough.

"While we're planning for psychephage involvement, we still shouldn't discount a human pulling the strings," she said, moving onto a more productive line of conversation. "We know this sort of thing can happen. I wouldn't put it past someone with an axe to grind and friends to carry on the fight to have bartered their soul for a full military warehouse."

Maria clicked and un-clicked her pen several times, mulling it over. "It's a possibility," she allowed. "But it raises the complexity of the game by involving more participants than the available evidence suggests, and you're dealing with the question of _whom_, and you've still dealing with the old questions of motive and what sort of psychephage could have pulled it off…"

"Fair point," said Coraline, putting down her pad. "We're running on next to no evidence right now as it is. Let's suspend any speculation until we can get anything a little more concrete."

"Speculation suspended," said Maria. She rose to her feet. "I'm going to get something that's at least fifty-percent caffeine before we land. Can I tempt anyone else?"

"I'll take … screw it, I'll help you get them," said Wybie, standing as well. "Anything for…?"

"Nothing for me," yawned Coraline. "I'll nap while I can. Wake me when we make a landing."

"Will do." Wybie smiled and bent down briefly to kiss her cheek before turning to depart. Coraline essayed a glance at his back, and then a glance at the pad with the base's information.

She tried once more to bully a plausible explanation for the theft out of the information she already had, and after failing, decided finally to follow her own advice of leaving it for the moment. Frustrating as it was, however, she couldn't deny that the job had a reassuring familiarity to it. It felt good to be back in this particular saddle, where she knew she could do a good job, where she felt at her best.

Heavens knew, the saddle of her day job was something to be endured, at best. And she might not have minded so much, if she'd hadn't had it forced upon her.

* * *

><p>It had started, as things do, in Tennessee. To be exact, with a phone-call from Tennessee, to the then-Secretary of the United States Department of the Supernatural.<p>

She really ought to have had alarm bells ringing from the start when the caller identified themselves as Brendan McCandless, the old and cunning four-term Democrat senator for the state.

McCandless was very much an anomaly in the right-aligned state, and had only acquired and held onto his position through a mixture of sheer determination, Machiavellian scheming, and ruthless politicking, and overlaid the lot with a kindly, grandfatherly drawl that could narrate the Apocalypse and leave you feeling vaguely reassured. He had done a lot of good for his state. If a quarter of the rumours were true, he was also the devil in human form. And he had an offer that Coraline couldn't refuse.

"Straight to business. That's promising," he had gently chuckled when Coraline had cautiously enquired what precisely the hell he was calling her for. "Well, Ms Jones, I shan't waste your time. This coming election, President Bardeaux won't intend to seek another term. There'll be a fierce nomination campaign from all corners in the party. I intend to be the nominee left standing. And I'd like you to be my candidate for Vice-President."

Silence had ruled for but a second.

Then, once Coraline had finished laughing, she had managed "And in what sort of parallel universe am I meant to be in to suppose that you're being _serious_, Mr McCandless?"

"Come now, give it fair consideration," he continued, his tone gentle and considered. "You've got all the qualities needed for the role and more. You've played a role in government for the past two decades, so you've got a great handle on how the system works. You've been a constant throughout several administrations, so you're obviously the best there is at what you do. You're still the woman who saved the nation from a military coup. You're straight-talking, smart, got a streak of integrity a mile wide, and for all that you've worked in government for a while, you've still got the best maverick credentials a man could ever see."

"Uh-huh. I'm not even a member of your party."

"Burnishes your maverick outsider credentials further. And the times you've spoken about issues outside your purview, you've certainly shown where your sympathies lie," he responded smoothly.

"For crying out – I have a role in government. I'm good at that role. Why the hell would I even want to _be_ a Vice-President?"

"Because _think_ about it." His tone was still gentle, his manner still gentlemanly, but there was now slender steel threaded throughout. "Let's not beat about the bush; the traditional role for a Vice-President _is_ to spin on a chair and set records for the number of consecutive rubber bands flicked into a trashcan. But they've still got power if they choose to exercise it. You can still have someone you trust as the Secretary. And you'll be in a position to see that a lot of favour goes the way of the department. All with my approval, and with reason for me to be grateful."

"We're good for getting what we already need," said Coraline curtly. "I don't need to go up a non-functioning rung on a ladder I want nothing to do with to keep on doing my job."

"That isn't a matter to be so sure about," came the crisp reply. Coraline paused.

"For your sake, senator, I hope that isn't a threat."

"I don't make _threats_, Ms Jones, without something to back them up. I care about the Presidency. More than I care about your department or your ongoing appointment. And anyone'll tell you that I'm a man who's good for gratitude, and _bad_ for grudges."

Coraline, once she had mastered herself, answered "You don't even know you'll get the nomination, much less the Presidency, you son of a bitch."

"Oh, but I shall." And the words this time were nothing but steel. "Look up my record. When I don't want to lose, I don't lose. Ever. And I won't this time either, no matter what you decide for yourself. What you can decide is whether, at the end of the day, you've made the President's life easier or not."

Silence.

"It'd be the done thing to give you some time to think it over. Thank you for your time, Ms Jones. A very good day to you," said the sudden kindly-grandfather, followed by a dialling tone.

An emergency meeting was called in short order.

"What are you going to do?" asked Maria.

"I haven't got much choice, have I?" snapped Coraline. "Either way, I'm not staying as Secretary. But if this is the hand he's dealing us, then I have to go with the hand that screws the department over the least."

"You don't know he'll end up in a position to screw us over," said Maria.

"Perhaps," said Wybie hesitantly, regarding a screen on a palmtop. "But the smart money's on that happening. This is a _scarily_ competent record he has. And you've seen the junior Republicans cross themselves whenever his name's mentioned."

"Then if he gets the nomination, I have to be his Vice-President," said Coraline bitterly. "I've got a few months left of this job, at the most. And one of you will have to take it on."

Nobody spoke until Maria said, reluctantly, "I'll take the bullet. I'll take the position. At least we've got a good foundation and system for the department."

"In which case," said Wybie, "I'll resign from the department as well. I'll be with you on the campaign."

"_Just_ a second," started Maria.

"You don't have to do that," said Coraline, trying past her gratified surprise to sound dissuasive and not-dissuasive at the same time.

"You're right," said Wybie. "I don't _have_ to."

A few months later, McCandless won the Democratic nomination for President, and announced Coraline Jones as his running mate

And the campaign after that, a blur of flashing cameras and news reels and fussing aides and barrages of interviews and non-stop movement, didn't bear thinking about, as far as Coraline was concerned. At one point, on top of all the baggage she'd accumulated before and during the race, she started being regarded as a straight-talking outsider, which was the point where she really started to _hate_ McCandless.

Wybie kept her sane. That result surprised him as much as anyone.

The result in November came as no great surprise. Coraline began to practise her rubber-band flicking while McCandless staffers drank the night away in intoxicated celebration.

And one fine day in January, two years ago now, on a day where the sun edged past slate-grey clouds and when Washington DC swelled with crowds, McCandless stood on a podium, one hand high and the other on a Bible, while the rest of his retinue, including Coraline, stood at attention.

He got as far as "…will faithfully execute," before stopping, frowning as if at something in the distance, and brought his raised hand around to wave feebly at his torso, and saying, with a touch of annoyed resignation, "Oh, damn it," before dropping dead on the spot of a myocardial infarction before a hundred thousand people and a thousand clicking cameras.

The weeks after that were hectic, to say the least. And hardly satisfying for anyone involved.

* * *

><p>"Coraline?"<p>

"Hmm?" She stirred, broken out of her light sleep. The plane felt as though it was dipping slightly, with rain still sluicing down the window. She turned to see Wybie standing next to her seat.

"Two minutes and we're in Massachusetts."

"At _last_," she said, shifting upright and cracking her knuckles. "Let's earn my keep, shall we?"


	4. Shellshock

The airfield they landed on was empty and dank, thin rivulets running like trails in the concrete to direct the bulk of the plummeting rain. A prewarned motorcade sat ready nearby, the lights cutting through the gloom and the windscreen wipers squeaking and protesting at the workload.

A quick sprint later, they were in the warmth and dryness of the motorcade's interior, motorcycles peeling away to their sides like wings as the car gently throttled to life. Coraline and Wybie and Maria were seated in the back with two other Secret Service agents, with Hawkwood and the driver occupying the front.

"Update from the home front," said Coraline conversationally, glancing at a trilling PDA on the folding desk in front of her. "Bernstein's back from his goodwill visit to Spain, and apparently had a lovely time and returns bearing gifts." She scrolled down the page, her eyebrows rising slightly. "One of which –and he's not saying which – is for me personally."

"That's the good thing about Vice-Presidents," said Wybie, watching a team of raindrops race to the window's bottom while they lasted. "You get to send them to faraway places, and when they come back, they bring back nice things. Where can you send him next?"

"Oh, shush. While he's here, he can do all the boring parts of my job as well." Bernstein, Coraline's Vice President, had been one saving grace of the job, combining cool-headedness with a good knowledge of the political system they worked in, as well as a desire to see the government run smoothly regardless of the President's experience. He was a good man for his job. Coraline often thought he would have been better for _her_ job, and allowed herself another spiteful thought at McCandless's expense.

She looked round at Maria, who looked deep in thought. She glanced up, meeting Coraline's own gaze, and hesitantly started speaking.

"Something's just occurred to me," said Maria. "If nobody objects to me breaking us from the subject of the various uses of Vice-Presidents. The base report said that all the security equipment shorted out at the same time, didn't it? Or as near to the same time as makes no difference."

"It did. Does that tell you something?"

"It does. That this had to have been the work of a group of psychephages, if psychephages were actually involved. One on its own couldn't have taken out all of the electronics at once, especially if it was something as petty as an argergeist. Even something like a beldam or unseelie would have had to expend a lot of power for simultaneous shorting over that size of area."

"A coatl?"

"Probably powerful enough. But then you've got logistical problems when it comes to moving the hardware. They don't have _arms_."

"That would make things tricky for them," said Coraline, drumming her fingertips on the desk. "So let's assume a group of relatively high-ranking psychephages, beldams or horlas or the like, acting in concert to clear out a warehouse, to … what end?"

"Inciting emotions would seem like the obvious answer. But this would be an unnecessarily risky way to go about it," said Wybie. "Perhaps it's just an insult aimed at you, to see what they can get away with. They've got no reason to love any government with you – _us_ in it."

"If that's the case, then it'd be a … remarkably _stupid_ thing to do," said Coraline. "I brought ferroshot with me."

The two agents in the car's back exchanged looks, which, thanks to focused training and the stoicism demanded by the job, admitted only the faintest parts of weary exasperation past their neutrally-composed masks. One of them discreetly nodded towards her. The other returned the gesture. This continued with increasing and yet-subtle vigour for several seconds before one of them, pausing briefly, tilted their head backwards towards Hawkwood in the front. The other paused, nodded assent, and whispered something into his earpiece.

"Madam President," started Hawkwood. "Recall our conversation on Air Force One. Recall our agency's purpose. We preserve your person. You keep yourself where we can do our job."

"The promise struck regarded detours, arguing, and trying to abandon the detail," said Coraline. "There's no reasonable threat to me in this matter."

"And while this matter doesn't relate to the strict letter of the promise, I believe that taking the field against supernatural monstrosities falls safely within the spirit of it, Madam President."

"If I'm to investigate the base, I need to be on site. If I'm on site and there's the potential for a psychephage encounter, then I need some manner of personal protection."

"Yes. That would be _us_." In the corner of her eye, Coraline saw Hawkwood pinching the bridge of his nose. "You're too vital to risked in this fashion, Madam President. If you're injured or worse, then there's uncertainty and fear in the country and others. Forgive me, but whatever it is you want to accomplish here is not and should not be your top priority. It isn't for those who have to protect you."

"I _get_ it," Coraline interrupted, her tone bordering on a snap, and Hawkwood stopped speaking, leaving a heavy silence in the car. It was broken by Coraline after a few awkward moments. "I'll go in there with a detail, Mr Hawkwood. I'll know what I'm looking for. I won't take unnecessary risks. Are those acceptable terms for my safety?"

After a pause of his own, Hawkwood, curt and clipped, answered "They'll have to be."

Coraline settled back in her seat, her face impassive, half an eye kept on her by a concerned Wybie, who gently took her hand where it lay next to him on the seat. It was a long-running issue between Director Hawkwood and Coraline. A lifetime's work of putting herself in harm's way had been upended by the Secret Service, who tended to disapprove of Presidents who did as such. And the fact that they had a legitimate point whenever she considered it did little to improve Coraline's feelings on the matter.

Maria looked between Coraline and Wybie, considered the situation, and leaned forward.

"Look, if the worst case scenario comes up, just in case it should," said Maria to Coraline, "We can just push Wybie at the psychephage and run. He'd at least confuse it for a few minutes."

"That's a_ terrible_ plan," Wybie objected.

"I agree," said Coraline, a rakish smile sliding onto her face. "What could the poor psychephage have done to deserve that?"

"That's a terrible refutation to the terribler plan."

"I suppose it doesn't really address dealing properly with the psychephage," said Maria thoughtfully. "Perhaps if we used him as a human shield?"

"There's not a _single_ part of this conversation I like."

The car continued sliding through the rain-slick darkness, flanked by its retinue along the roads leading to the base, which, in due time, rose before them.

It was a base on the outskirts of a town, concrete roads leading to and under reinforced gates set along a perimeter wall. Small motorgun emplacements and lights bristled along the top, stark against the looming grey shapes of the buildings within. The gate guards for the route they'd chosen had been forewarned, and swung open the large gates as they neared, admitting them in and closing the gate behind them. The streets were wide for the admittance of vehicles and deserted at this hour and in this weather.

They drew near the central building, a slate-grey cuboid with a forlorn-looking and sodden flag hanging onto the post outside for dear life. A small group was already there, waiting underneath umbrellas and huddled into military-issue coats.

"Madam President," said the first of the men as Coraline stepped from the car, "It's an honour to have you…"

"Indoors. Then introductions," said Coraline, ushering everyone towards the building's front door. "And coffee, if possible."

* * *

><p>"You can probably guess why I'm here, colonel," said Coraline, once a few minutes had passed and they were comfortably ensconced within a small and spare meeting room in the base's headquarters, hands wrapped around steaming mugs.<p>

"I could probably take an inspired guess or two, Madam President," said Post Commander Fredricks, a thin and harassed-looking man in a colonel's braid, who had the drawn look of someone who had been substituting too much caffeine for sleep. "I wasn't expecting a personal interest to be taken, but I'm certainly very grateful for…"

"I've got you beaten on the gratitude part, I'm afraid," said Coraline, finishing her mug with a drawn-out sip, setting it back on the beaten table. "To business. Has there been any further investigation since the report you sent to the Defence Department?"

"No, Madam President. There's no security protocol for this, but once we'd established that the place was empty and had wracked our brains trying to come up with answers to 'how', 'why', and 'who' and suchlike, one of the staff suggested it might be a Sur-real affair. We decided to suspend investigation until a response was sent back to us, in case we disturbed something we shouldn't."

"That was wise of you. And no other information's fallen into your lap since?"

"Nothing credible. A few cranks. The same groups trying to claim responsibility. We've arranged for replacement hardware to be made and to arrive, barring some of the experimental models." He paused, as if trying to decide whether or not something was relevant.

"What is it, colonel?" Coraline said, prompting him.

"During the initial comb-over, some of the men reported feeling peculiar. As if they were getting tired more quickly. We drew them out immediately and checked for any possible chemical residue if it had been an attack, but nothing turned up."

"That … is very interesting indeed," said Coraline carefully, recognising what resembled the lethargy left in the wake of a light psychephage feeding. She shifted in her chair slightly, catching Wybie's eye, and nodded. "Where is the warehouse?"

"Just a minute's walk from here, Madam President. Shall I take you there?"

"Take me and my detail there," said Coraline, standing. "Let's see what I can't dig up."

* * *

><p>The warehouse was a large building, close to the base headquarters as Fredricks had said, and wider and longer than nearly any other building in the camp. It was squat, concrete-grey, set with huge and unsubtle doors on two of its sides and with a third smaller one through which Coraline, Wybie, Maria, and a pair of Secret Service agents entered.<p>

The interior was hardly prepossessing either. It had been built for simple function, and the large main hall, the shadowed sides separated by metal columns, was lit by harsh, buzzing lights. Racks for rocketry and shells formed mazes in corners and at one end, screens in which vehicles would have been parked rose here and there, currently haphazard, nondescript storage containers rose in neatly ordered piles.

All of it was picked clean. The amount of murderous ordnance at hand wouldn't have posed a threat to a paralysed earthworm.

"Falchion, Firework, and Burdock at destination," one of the agents muttered as they walked to the room's centre. "Investigation underway."

Coraline looked around, closing her eyes briefly as she tried to get a feel for the place. The sound of their footsteps echoed, rebounding off the multiple vertical screens and walls and curved surfaces. The lights buzzed above, quiet enough to not be maddening but loud enough to be a distraction. The air smelt of cut metal, of faintly acidic cleaning solution, of …

… of something slightly sickly and slightly sweet, barely on the edge of detectable for even her learned senses. The air felt ever-so-subtly sharper.

She was sure they weren't alone.

"You get it as well?" asked Maria as Coraline cautiously stepped forward, a careful frown setting on her features.

"I get it," said Coraline. "_Something's_ Sur-real about all this." She took another step. "But … it's not that strong."

"Not really strong enough for anything which could have pulled this off," said Wybie, the two agents who trailed him only looking mystified. "Granted, we're in a real place. But psychephage occupants should still leave some sort of greater mark than this."

"Perhaps…" said Coraline, and then stopped.

She had heard something. Something which could have been a muted gasp, a cough, or a muffled movement. Something which, she would have bet money on, wasn't the sort of thing meant to be found in a base.

She held up a hand, gesturing for silence, and listened again.

It came once more, quieter, still indiscernible. Whatever it was, it wasn't near, but it was near enough.

She had ferroshot at hand, but no weapon with which to fire it. That could be helped.

"Agent Sani?" she said quietly.

"Yes, Madam President?" replied one of the agents.

"Please give me your gun."

Agent Sani halted. "I can't do that, ma'am."

"Why not?"

"Director Hawkwood was clear on giving you an excuse to put yourself in the line of fire, ma'am. I'm sorry. If there's any risk of an engagement, then give Agent Takeda and myself the ferroshot." The other agent nodded.

Coraline sighed. "If I can't engage in any combat myself, and if that has to be done by the most competent one here, then give your gun to Secretary Ortega. She's had more encounters with hostile psychephages than you, and she came out intact for most of them."

Sani hesitated, and then passed his pistol, grip first, to Maria, who accepted it gingerly.

Coraline briefly considered asking Maria to give _her_ the gun, but reluctantly decided that there was such a thing as being too underhanded. She passed over her clip of ferroshot, which was locked and loaded with the practise of old routine.

The noise came again, closer this time and from somewhere between the screens to their right. The agents froze, Takeda's hand drawing out his own gun, and Maria slowly raising the ferroshot-armed gun. Coraline slowly tracked her eye along the screen walls, and motioned at one of them, the main side of which directly faced them, hinged ends folding away from them.

The air all but standing still, their breaths held, they approached the screen as softly as they could. Coraline stood before it, Wybie right beside her, Takeda and Maria closer to the screen's sides, Sani beside Takeda and ready to throw a punch.

Coraline breathed out, placed her hands on the lightweight screen, and looked from Wybie to Maria to the agents and back to the screen.

She then seized the edge of it and pulled back hard, springing backwards as it clattered to the floor, braced and ready for an attack which never came. What she got instead was a high and piteous yowl, and the flash of a dark and low figure bounding away from them and into the dead end of a recess in the room.

"Stop where you are!" shouted Coraline, as she lunged after it, matched by the others, weapons brandished. "By the authority of the Concord, STOP!"

The figure, from which the pungent sweet smell of the Sur-real came heavily, threw itself blindly on and away from them making for a door that etched itself out of the wall as it neared. A ferroshot round lashed out from Maria's gun, slashing sparks off the door where it hit, eliciting a yelp and a swift, panicked turn from the figure, which scrabbled to face the oncoming group, scrabbled back to face the fading image of the door, and settled for pushing itself as hard into the wall as it could, whimpering as it did.

Coraline, as she saw it more clearly, identified it as a kimatine, a courage-eater. It was canine in appearance and size, its body compact with muscle and its short, broad muzzle dripping with slaver. The kimatine's hide, bristling with smoke-black fur, was threaded through with strands of silvery lightning, and in its head, two eyes blazed like miniature novae.

"Stop there, for God's sake!" snapped Coraline as they approached it, cautious around something obviously cornered and desperate. It scrabbled wildly at the wall with its paws, all but ramming itself into the wall with panic. "Stop and calm do…"

"Go away!" came the all-but-scream from the kimatine, voice modulated and deepened by the structure of its throat, the ringing echoes left by it seeming to hang longer in the air. "_Pumanta ang layo! _ Spitsear and tearing and rushing shadow and cold night! Go away! Let me go away!"

Coraline hesitated. Whatever she'd been planning for, she hadn't anticipated this. "Calm down. We're…"

"You? _You? _It! It burns and mocks, it tore through my domain, terror behind it and it left me to watch and it can't come again, faceless! Mocking! _Mangyaring_, leave me!" The kimatine slammed itself into the wall for a last time, crumpling into a heap in the ground, heaving retches escaping it in quick succession.

"This … what is this?" murmured Maria, leaning in closer to Coraline, her gun still trained on the kimatine. Takeda still had his own weapon levelled, his expression simultaneously apprehensive and nakedly curious.

"I … I don't know," said Coraline. She stared right at the kimatine, slumped into the wall, feverishly babbling "_Ito ay darating na, hindi ito maaaring tumagal ng sa akin muli, ito ay darating na, hindi ito maaaring tumagal ng sa akin muli…_" to itself over and over again. "Kimatines aren't powerful enough to pull something like the short-out and heist off, are they?"

"No. They're medium-weights," said Wybie sidling closer beside her and watching the kimatine with pure bemusement. "And this one doesn't really seem in a state to do much of anything beyond gibber and panic."

The kimatine, at that moment, swivelled suddenly to face them again. Its face grew tighter and starker, its eyes flaring as it caught sight of and focused on Coraline, shrinking back in on itself even as it watched them.

"_You_," it whispered, in a voice that trembled even more so than before. "Stormcrow and silencer. From one to other in this darkest gyre and bloody shreds tipping in the balance and _nothing_ left! _Nothing!_" It put one paw forwards, immediately drew it back, and flicked its flickering gaze from side to side.

"Just…calm down," said Coraline as gently as she could. "We're not here to hurt you if we don't have to. We're …"

"Know you!" The kimatine bounded forward, both front paws firmly on the floor, its upper body low to the ground and its head angled upwards, meeting Coraline' gaze. "Know you and it have destroyed. It took my safest domain, you, my pack-sibling. Both colliding! Sheets of fire consuming! You don't understand! You won't understand! You can't understand!"

The kimatine's entire body tensed, gleaming claws sliding out from the ends of its paws and digging into the ground, drawing the renewed attention of Maria and Takeda's weapons.

"You _must_ understand!"

"Easy!" demanded Coraline, gun safeties unclicking in the ringing silence between words. The kimatine took no notice.

"_I will make you understand!_"

And it hurled itself up through the air, body unfolding out from its tensed position and sliding right into the form in which it did its best work, a weapon banded with lightning and tipped with teeth and claws, growling with enough force to shudder the walls and air and world-

Takeda's shot pealed across the room a fraction of a second before Maria's, the two creating a deafening discord of sound and tearing into the springing kimatine. Takeda's normal round impacted into its torso, knocking it to one side in the air, and right into the path of Maria'a own ferroshot, a flash that turned to a blazing white line as it tore through the kimatine and out the other side. It fell limp in the air with a sudden and pained yowl, hurtling past Coraline and crashing into the floor scant feet behind her.

She span on her heel, and as the maddened thing tore itself around to face her, her boot crashed into its face, flooring it once more and opening it up for another volley of shot.

It yowled as Takeda's found its mark, and was cut short at Maria's. It swayed where it reclined, its expression unfocused and almost confused, before it finally slumped flat, eye-fires winking out.

The air was still heavy with echoes, the room still pounding with the noise of heartbeats.

Finally, Wybie knelt down, looking at the kimatine from a different angle, biting his lip and drumming his fingers on one leg as he did so.

"That…" he started hesitantly, "…that was … I don't _know_ what that was."

He looked up at the others, his expression utterly bewildered.

"That answered _nothing_."

"No. Quite the opposite," agreed Coraline, stepping closer and craning her head towards the dead psychephage. "Why was it terrified? Was it even involved?"

"What was it even trying to say?" said Maria, giving the stunned Sani his gun back. "What was it raving about at the end?"

"Those are all _very_ good questions," said Wybie. He glanced up at the others and to the kimatine. "And don't look at _me_ when you ask them."


	5. Omen

"I've called ahead to Bernstein and the cabinet," said Coraline, thumbing distractedly at a sleek handheld. "They know I'm coming, and they know more or less what happened here."

"Even though _we're_ not entirely sure what happened here," said Maria.

"They know we encountered a kimatine, that we had to resort to lethal force, and that the exact details of the clearout have yet to be fully established. That'll be your job for the next few days."

They were ascending the stairs back into Air Force One, the darkness of the airfield given depth by an encroaching sunrise, crimson suffusing into the dark clouds. Rain pattered down in a drizzle, steady and sapping.

"Do I get a job?" asked Wybie, undoing a button on his coat as they stepped into the plane's warm interior, aides and staff moving to them.

"On top of all you're already doing with the Centre for Sur-real Research? You don't have to unless you want…"

"I do. This is like the old days; this is fun."

"Not exactly like the old days. We've established this."

"No, I can feel it. Any moment now, I'm going to say something urbane and unflappable, Maria will Sherlock the crap out of something, and you'll set a pyschephage on fire."

"On fire?"

"Don't ask me. Your hypothetical self had a _really_ bad day."

Coraline passed her coat to an expectant aide. "Give Maria whatever help you can. Both of you pull up whatever we know about kimatines, and make sure a Department team gets to the base to carry out a full investigation. God knows _that_ needs more investigating."

"I can see what we've got in the neurology files," said Wybie dubiously. "I'm not sure what could make a psychephage … well, _hysterical_ like that. Did it clear the base out because it was mad, or did performing the clearout drive it mad? I mean, some sort of hysteria after energy burnout could be possible, but…"

"Get me … that is, Maria, whatever you can dig up. I'll see what more I can do, but I can't promise anything. If I have enough time…"

A ping came, sharp and insinuant, from the palmtop secured at Coraline's side, and she plucked it up to answer it. She frowned at the screen, and glanced at Wybie and Maria.

"…Aaaand I won't have enough time, not at the moment. Brainstorm, both of you. Talk to me when I'm done."

"What's come up?"

"Something big. I need to take this."

"Nothing I can help wi…"

"National security kind of big," said Coraline, looking hurriedly away from them, to the corridor looping deeper into the plane. "I'll find you after." She stopped and leaned in closer to Wybie, kissing him before she turned away.

"Okay," said Wybie worriedly as Coraline moved off quickly, Secret Service agents shadowing her. His pensive gaze lingered, and he then reluctantly turned to Maria.

"So?" he said. "Where's a good brainstorming place in this?"

* * *

><p>A good brainstorming place was the same study from the outward flight, and Wybie settled himself with a groan in one of the padded chairs while Maria leaned against the wall.<p>

"A few theories come to mind regarding the kimatine's state of mind," said Wybie. "One of them is iron contamination."

"How feasible is that?"

"Not very, but we've known it to happen. Remember the nuckelavee down in Cape Coral? It was as wild and incoherent when confronted as that kimatine, and after it had been taken care of, we discovered that a piece of iron –a stray piece of ferroshot that hadn't penetrated all the way– had been lodged inside its head, driving it insane."

"Thing is, we discovered that when the nuckelavee's body fell apart and the piece of iron fell to the ground," replied Maria. "I saw the kimatine's dissolution, and it left nothing behind apart from the usual smear. And if there was a piece of iron, it was too small to be seen, and hence too small to induce that kind of madness."

"Depends on the purity of the iron," said Wybie, rubbing his chin. "Steel would ache a lot, but do nothing. But even a tiny amount of fusion-made iron could wreak havoc."

"Perhaps. But we can't pursue this unless the follow-up teams discover a tangible piece of iron. What else?"

"Alternatively, there's always energy burnout," said Wybie. "Have a chain of events. Kimatine expends a lot of power. That power could have been what aided it in stealing the hardware. And psychephages tend to get a little out of sorts after burning through most of their reserves."

"At what point in this chain of events does the kimatine get anything like the initial power to expend? You yourself said they're medium-weights in the psychephage power rankings."

"Then … we'd floated the idea of a psychephage partnership, hadn't we? It could have worked in concert with a whole pack, or a couple of beldams, or whatever. It pays more than its share of power into the bargain, it gets shafted and left behind by its companions, and then we happen along and everything goes downhill for the kimatine from there."

Maria opened her mouth, and then shut it, tapping one foot against the ground restlessly.

"Here's something like that theory," she said. "From time to time, we've known psychephages to feed on each other. Could that hysteria have been caused by another psychephage amplifying its emotions and feeding off the kimatine?"

"That … _could_ be the case. What would produce that sort of emotional response, though?"

"A drekavac? Paranoia eater? It was raving about shadows and threats to itself, as best I could tell. But they're even lower down in the pecking order, they wouldn't have much chance of feeding off of a …" Maria trailed off.

"This is pointless," she said, slowly, after a considered silence. "We're not working off of much more information than we were at the beginning. All we've got is a mad-then-dead kimatine, and nothing to guide any particular line of thought. We still can't determine a motive. We've got no idea there was even a rational motive involved. We can speculate until we're blue in the face, but until … unless the follow-up team uncovers something, it'll do us no good."

"Fair point," said Wybie reluctantly. "I move that we suspend investigation until we have something more to bat around."

"Motion upheld," replied Maria, letting herself fall into one of the chairs.

"When we get back, I might have a word with the Ambassador myself," mused Wybie. "I could just step in with a notepad and pencil, saying 'Morning there, Ambassador. Say, I want to know how a psychephage could be driven insane. Mind helping me out?'"

Maria snorted. Around them, the plane ploughed on, the previous drizzle once again building towards to a steady rainfall, a blur of black outwith and a soft rattle against the small, thick windows. The lightning had at least died down for now, and the clouds were slowly drinking in colour from the dawn.

"Out of sheer curiosity, and this is something you'll have investigated more than me," said Maria, as she watched the dark window, "How long could the hardware survive in the Sur-real? Would it not degenerate? Assuming it was kept and stored at all."

"As long as it would here," said Wybie. "As far as we can tell, the real and Sur-real don't degenerate each other. The gear could be stored anywhere where the environment was accommodating, so anywhere that didn't open onto empty space. The same applies to us. Given anywhere with enough physical terrain, we could potentially live for extended periods in the Sur-real as happily as here. Likewise, psychephages can go anywhere in reality through a gateway, as long as they stick to places with a suitable Sur-real presence."

Maria nodded and Wybie continued, his tone growing faster and more cheerful. "I mean, the gear's electronics might be shorted out by the sheer weight of Sur-real energy, but that could be warded against by any pyschephage or psychephages with sufficient energy. Like how we use thaumic-inhibitors in Eroders or other Sur-real scanning kit, or how we use…"

The sound of technobabble rose, filling the plane's space as it flew onwards, rain flashing around it in the dark skies.

* * *

><p>Coraline drummed her fingers on the armrests of her hard seat, and looked around at the National Security Council. Their faces were taut and concerned, and rendered slightly staticky by the wild weather without.<p>

"An attack in Belarus?" she asked, her tone demanding clarification.

"A smartbomb targeted at the state residence, when President Juvage was present with his cabinet," said the Director of the CIA, her face frozen and tone laconic. "Concurrent with a strike on the Defence Ministry's headquarters, right when it was fully staffed. The death toll's still being estimated, but it's in the dozens at the least. The blocks around the sites have been evacuated and corded off, and all of their military stations are on high alert. Juvage was badly injured, and several high-ranking ministers have been confirmed dead."

"Christ. Have we sent official messages?"

"Not yet. You'll need to make an official response when you get back, and we've extended offers of help and rescue work through the proper channels, but there's still too much shock over there for any clear response to have gotten back."

Coraline looked up at the television screens in the Situation Room, silent videos of fire and unspooling smoke flashing across them, newscasts in Cyrillic and Latin letters spilling across the bottom, grey-plaster smoke and red flames leaping into a dark sky.

The whole room around her was a simulacrum, rendered by her slim headset and the scanners wired into the workings of this room in Air Force One. Her own image would appear to the Security Council on a framework of screens, and it was an effective system for making her feel involved from a distance, more aware of the growing situation.

In all honesty, there was a limit to the level of immersion one could reach when the National Security Advisor's face had a tendency to dissolve away in a mess of pixels. But there were more important matters to focus on.

"Who's confessed or suspected?" she asked. Belarus was the main power broker in that region since Russia's near-collapse at the hands of the Grey Plague, and had become one of America's more prominent allies. "Rogue officers? Fourth Reichers? Earth Originists?"

"We've got a confessed candidate, ma'am," said the Director of Homeland Security. "They left a calling card."

"Come again?"

The Director leaned across the table, holding a small white card, and carefully placed it on the table where Coraline could see it. She looked down and saw, emblazoned across the front in simple upper-case black letters, **TT**.

"The Tantibalic Tendency," said the Director simply. "They left what must have been a hundred of these cards fluttering amidst the debris left. They've left them before in attacks they've claimed credit for."

He reached out and turned it over, revealing a passage on the back. Coraline leaned in for a closer look, at the strange, disjointed words that rung some faint bell.

_It is all, and it is many.  
>It is many, it is all.<br>It was here before you rose.  
>It will be here when you fall.<em>

_-Our sincerest salutations to those left in this wake. Our sincerest sorrow for what must come. Our last gambit for days to pass painlessly._

Coraline looked away from the card.

"What sort of terrorist leaves a _card_ behind them?" she said.

"They do, ever since they started appearing a couple of months back," said the Secretary of Homeland Security. "There's still huge tensions and resource conflicts throughout Eastern Europe and the sub-continent, places where recovery's been too slow in the coming. They'd been stirring up more conflict there. We believe they're just the usual collection of shellshocked soldiers without a home and syn-virus conspiracy-theorists, though we've had trouble pinning an overriding motive on them. Especially now, in light of this attack."

"They've made no public demands or claims of responsibility?"

"Nothing bar a load of business cards behind them at every stage. We don't know what they want, and so far they haven't been forthcoming. And there's been no pattern to what they've been doing. A bombed-out theatre here, a sabotaged transport hub there, a motorgunned street here, and an open march on odd occasions. This was the first target of note, with something that might have had a motive behind it. Except they still haven't made any public threats or demands."

"They used smartbombs," said Coraline. "Why weren't any thefts from the old stockpiles reported?"

"It's … possible nobody noticed," said the CIA Director, her voice growing reluctant and hesitant. "Or, more disturbingly, that the security for the stockpiles may be compromised. I've ordered a full security review of our own zones of responsibility, and sent missives to my foreign counterparts advising that they do likewise."

"While you're doing that, dig up information on the Tantibalics," ordered Coraline. "Anyone with the gall to strike at a major power and the hardware to do so isn't likely to call it a day at just one. Compare notes, everyone, and keep me in the loop. I'll send my condolences to President Juvage and affirmation that we'll stand by Belarus in bringing the Tantibalics to justice. Resend the offers for aid teams and press our other allies to do the same."

"Yes, Madam President."

"Put a link through to Juvage now, if you can, and I'll talk to him now," said Coraline, cold grit setting in as she braced herself for what was bound to become a long day. "Make sure any aid gets through. Belarus won't be alone in this."


	6. Obscurity

It was mid-day by the Air Force One arrived back in Washington, moving past other lines of air traffic to a private field on the outskirts of the city, from which a high-speed rail ran right to the White House. What little sun there was had to shoulder its way past looming black clouds, pulsing with thunder and sending, for the moment, brief sharp showers to the ground.

Coraline was still busy in conversation with the injured President Juvage when the plane touched down, staying behind to finish the call while discreetly sending a message to Wybie and Maria to leave ahead of her.

Ten more minutes passed before nurses at the other end of the call intervened and Juvage, stubborn and cantankerous at the best of times and no less so in these circumstances, was finally convinced to submit to further anaesthetic.

"Our intelligence services will exchange files on the Tantibalics," he pressed even as a breathing mask was fitted onto his face, the programming within the calling service auto-translating his Belarusian into English. "Thirty of my people died this day at their hands. The bastards will burn. They will _burn_."

"Everything we have on file will be at your disposal," assured Coraline. "CIA teams will co-ordinate with your own State Security. Vice-President Aksana can make sure the link-up goes smoothly during your recovery."

Juvage would have said more had the anaesthetic not chosen that exact moment to kick in with a vengeance. An aide leaned across and switched off the call at the Belarusian end, and Coraline gratefully sat back, disentangling herself from the headset. Hawkwood, at attention by her seat, looked down.

"Good God," said Coraline wonderingly. "He took two pounds of steel shrapnel to the chest. He shouldn't be _alive_, let alone cursing the air blue. He can't be human."

"I couldn't comment, ma'am," said Hawkwood. "If your business here is done, then shall I arrange the escort back to the White House?"

"I thought I might just walk back," said Coraline. "It's just a few miles, and I've got a coat. I could meet people, mingle, and talk to them. Maybe take a detour, just to see how much of the city's as I remember it."

Hawkwood didn't respond in words.

"It was a _joke_, Director."

"Indeed. I'll make the call ahead to the rail, ma'am."

"You do that. When I'm back, I can briefly check on what Wybie and Maria are doing, and with any luck, nothing else major will…"

The palmtop pinged again, in a tone that brooked no dismissal. Coraline seized it, scrutinised the message, and then absently looked up at the ceiling.

"A huge sack of money is _not_ about to fall into my lap," she said. Hawkwood, half-way through his call, stared.

"Never mind. Apparently, this doesn't work to my advantage," said Coraline, sighing as she pushed herself up from the chair. "Order a swift transfer for the rail. Apparently, the Situation Room's getting lonely without me."

"Understood," said Hawkwood. "Shall I inform the First Gentleman and Secretary of the Supernatural?"

"Only if you have a spare moment. They weren't counting on my turning up in person, and they know what they're doing." Coraline shrugged on her coat. "Hopefully, they're not doing it in a way that'll get them killed."

* * *

><p>"I'll bet you anything Maria thought I was joking when I suggested this approach," said Wybie, holding a pad of paper and a pencil in his hands, fixing the room's other inhabitants with a disarming smile.<p>

"That of interviewing me for purposes as-yet-unspecified?" asked the Ambassador. She stood with her own cup and saucer, with a spindly-legged table on which a steaming china kettle was set sitting next to her. The table moved in time with her whenever she paced, with the jerky and eager movements of a puppy, the kettle bobbing precariously as it did so.

"Exactly. Can't imagine why. I'm sure I said it in my most serious voice." Wybie flipped through the pages of his pad, golden in the gaslight, looking for one bereft of scribbled notes and diagrams. "She's interviewing one of the Chartered Grimalkin, in case they know something about my purposes as-yet-unspecified."

"Good luck to her, for it shall surely be needed. The grimalkin seldom bother to notice anything beyond their arrogant snouts," said the Ambassador. She sipped at her cup. "My own information, however, will doubtless be much more complete and edifying. And I am, as always, pleased to render aid and information to the rightful authorities of this nation. How may I assist you?"

"Let's say I wanted to drive a psychephage insane. How could I do so?"

The Ambassador paused, smile fritzing.

"This is just _theory_, you understand."

"… I do hate to press upon you, but I would greatly appreciate the context in which this information would prove relevant."

"Did Coraline talk to you about our situation in Massachusetts?"

"Oh, indeed. I uncovered information for her regarding that, about the courage-hunting kin therein. Who curiously enough went to their Last Hunt merely last night." The Ambassador held the cup out to the kettle for a refill, which obliged as the table bent its front legs, sending clouds of steam tipping from the spout. "Related to your own investigation, perchance?"

"Yes. It was hysterical, raving, and it tried to attack us. And it happened to be the psychephage sitting on a base from which a large quantity of weapons had gone missing. What … how do you think the two could be linked? Are they linked?"

"Had it been wounded by the bane previously? If particles remain in a wound, then a slow death comes with madness as a herald …"

"No iron wounds, as far as we could tell."

"Then … in any other case, I might suggest abandonment at the hands of its close-kin or pack. That would leave any of the kin unsettled…"

"That could support a previous theory," said Wybie excitedly, moving his pencil to the page.

"It couldn't. Kimatines, when they hunt in groups, hunt with other kimatines, and a pack would sooner face annihilation than leave a member behind to madness and death." The Ambassador sipped deeply at her cup. "And though near-pack-annihilation might also suffice for the purposes of inducing mental instability, I can conceive of no scenario where a foe would destroy all of a pack bar one."

"Then … damn. Are you sure there's no psychephages that could hunt like that, by feeding off the emotions of the one left behind? Maybe a horla, or a drekavac?"

The Ambassador rapped her claws against the cup, considering and careful. Finally, she shook her head.

"Unlikely in the extreme."

"I see," said Wybie. He considered his pad, briefly crossing something out, and then looked back up at the Ambassador. "Don't despair. I've got plenty more possibilities to go through with you."

"Joy," said the Ambassador, holding her cup out for another refill.

* * *

><p>This time, the Situation Room was a great deal more tangible, the musk of uncertainty and barely-maintained poise palpable. Coraline kneaded her forehead, and gave the CIA Director as straight a look as she could manage.<p>

"_More_ attacks?"

"Yes, ma'am." Text spooled across the screens around the room's sides, slotting next to red-and-black newsreels. "Reports are coming in from Islamabad, New Jerusalem, and Edinburgh. Strikes at the heart of government, with death counts in all cases rising into the dozens, co-ordinated to fall within the same fifteen minute period. Presidents Zardari and Colquhoun have been confirmed as dead, along with their immediate successors."

Coraline sat still, keeping her silence as the Director continued. "We know who the perpetrators are. They left their calling cards in each location."

"Wha … for God's _sake_," hissed Coraline as the Director held up what seemed to be the same card from earlier, the white card of the Tantibalic Tendency.

"We … have managed to compare notes with our Belarusian counterparts, and we're currently trying to lay down a framework for their attacks, so we can identify patterns and weapons used and any individuals involved…"

The Director spoke, and Coraline listened even as the matter reeled through her head.

The world they lived in was still no paradise, she knew. Chaos and oppression were still familiar faces, depending on where you stepped, and wherever you found darkness, you found a few on the periphery eager to exploit it, those who instead saw some twisted light and made a banner of the darkness. Those who could certainly do something like this and feel they were in the right.

But it was another thing to actually have the network and resources and will to carry it out. The atrocities were bad enough. The co-ordination compounded them. And the sheer _audacity_…

"What individuals were involved? Do we know how many? Were they suicide attacks? Bombs planted ahead of time?"

"Planted bombs. At the same time as they went off, other individuals in dark fatigues and body armour opened fire for a brief period with automatic weapons around the areas struck, and vanished almost as soon as they'd appeared, with no sign of getaway vehicles or abandoned clothes or any evidence of an escape beyond their absence. Only one was apprehended, and they committed suicide with their own weapon rather than be taken prisoner."

"Did that one have an identity?"

"None that could be determined. They'd taken the skin off their fingertips to defy identification, they had no nametags or any personal items, they'd shaved their hair and cauterised their scalp and chin, undergone some form of face-altering surgery, and had their eyes replaced with custom augmetics. They were male, probably in their mid-thirties, and that's all we know. They wanted _nothing_ to be attached to them."

Coraline took the card, and tapped the edge against her finger in a restless motion.

"And the Tantibalics have announced no motives or demands?"

"Still not a hint of motive. We can't even pinpoint them as an apocalyptic cult or anything similar. Their methods don't fit anything expected."

Coraline, deep in thought, absently folded the card into a small ball and rolled it onto the table, rapping her fingers on the surface.

"Then we do what we can," she said after a moment. "Director, your new purpose in life is to become the bestest friend of every intelligence agency we're friends with and to shamelessly flirt with those who aren't. Find the Tantibalic Tendency. Bring me whatever information you find, and act on it before then if time is of the essence."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And as for your agency," said Coraline, turning to the FBI Director. "Take whatever the CIA gives you, work with the Department of Homeland Security, and bump up security in all cities. Chemical screening, background checks, re-investigation of existing terrorist networks and possible cells in case one of them is acting as a front. The Tantibalics will repeat their act in the USA over our dead bodies, is that understood?"

"Understood."

"And send a liaison to the Department of the Supernatural. They're investigating the recent disappearance of the hardware from Massachusetts, and I wouldn't be surprised if that and the attacks by the Tantibalics were linked in some way."

The FBI Director looked dubious. "I … shall ascertain what the Department could know, but you'll understand if priorities mean that…"

"Not to tell you how to do your job, Director, but if the theft of high-security hardware, coupled with the possible involvement of creatures that can appear and reappear between points in our world, doesn't seem worthy of some token investigation, then what _does_?" Coraline stood, and the rest of the table stood with her. "I need to handle our public response. And if, in a week's time, I have to renegotiate the federal budget on account of so many people in your departments working overtime, then that _won't_ be a problem. We'll meet again tomorrow when we have more to work with."

The table chorused "Madam President," as Coraline left the room. She had a press briefing room waiting for her, the conduit to a world which really _didn't_ need to broil over with fear and chaos at the moment.

* * *

><p>"You know, I've been meaning to ask," said Wybie, as he looked forlornly over several pages worth of notes, ninety percent of which were covered with scribbling-out. "What <em>are<em> you drinking from that cup?"

The Ambassador seemed to not hear the question. "It seems this session has not been of much help to you. For that, I apologise."

"It's frustrating," muttered Wybie. "It's strange as well. Before this whole business, my centre and the Department hadn't exactly been run off their feet. In fact, for a few months there'd been a pretty steady drop in the number of breaches of the Concord, or other things that the Department had to deal …with…." Wybie's expression shifted back to excited speculation. "Wait."

"Waiting," said the Ambassador dubiously, watching him over her cup rim.

"What would that … let's discuss that. Is anything going on amongst the psychephages? Could whatever it is have driven the kimatine insane?"

"Merely a brief waning period," said the Ambassador smoothly. "There are times when many of the kin seems to withdraw at once, whether for rest or reproduction or other purposes in our world. They tend to occur for many kin at the same time. Check your records, and I imagine you'll find similar waning intervals. And since the kimatine in question was still very much present in its lair and your world, I couldn't speculate on how it could have been a cause."

"Damn." Wybie scratched the back of his head. "Well, how about…?"

There was a knock at the door, and the sound of Maria's voice. "Wybie? Are you in there?"

"Would you believe me if I said no?"

The door opened, admitting Maria, the guards outside briefly looking in. "Am I interrupting the critical acquisition of information?"

"How did you guess the exact opposite?" Wybie sighed. "Any luck with Spitfire?"

A cat followed at her ankles, a Siamese with a blue-and-red band around one leg. It briefly looked up at the Ambassador, the air between them all but freezing before it redirected its attention to Wybie.

"Goodness," muttered the Ambassador to herself. "I appear to be becoming a venue."

"You may ask _me_ that, Binadamu," said the Siamese to Wybie, its collar reading 'Spitfire', using a voice thick with haughty disdain. "And no information I had was able to illuminate her situation. Nor, I imagine, could that held by the beldam."

"Call it a day for this approach, then," said Wybie to Maria. "There might be something we're not picking up on in what we've already got stored. We can get more of the Department in on this."

"Fine," agreed Maria. "We can check again once we've got more to work from. If we actually manage to get more to work from this time."

"Once again, my apologies," said the Ambassador. "My duty, to act with and assist your government with matters of our kin, clearly cannot be fulfilled under the current…"

The cat snorted. The Ambassador's smile tightened, and then returned to normal.

"Come on," said Wybie. "We'll keep ourselves busy. I imagine Coraline will be doing the same."

"You've not seen a television yet, have you?" asked Maria. "That's something of an understatement."

* * *

><p>Midday rolled into afternoon, which in turn shifted towards evening; and the thick layers of clouds that formed the sky steadily darkened, the showers from them becoming harder and more frequent, the winds that carried them strengthening and battering once again at the city. Flags snapped and waved tautly on poles, and shadows darkened and slowly moulded together on the streets.<p>

Coraline trudged into the Oval Office just as evening yielded to proper night, her coat draped over her arm, Mr Moloney at her back.

"There wasn't a single part of that which anyone bar a lunatic would call fun," said Coraline, her tone leaden.

"I thought you dealt with it well enough," said Moloney.

"It's more that there was anything to deal with at all. This is going to become a horrible mess with no good way out. And I know that the…oh, come _on_. You don't even get to plead first offence for it this time." Coraline arched her brow as she finally noticed the room's other inhabitants.

"What? It's a comfy desk. And I'm still enjoying having enough flexibility to do this sort of thing," said Wybie, from where he sat with his feet up on the Resolute Desk. Maria leaned on the desk, her palms apart, watching the two with a wry expression. Wybie's own expression as he took stock of Coraline. "Crap day?"

"A reasonable presumption," said Coraline, dropping her coat on a chair. "Yours?"

"Not as productive, but nowhere near as crap," said Wybie, pulling himself with a groan from his position and moving forward to give her a kiss and a hug, which she returned gratefully, allowing herself to lean into him. "Talk about a hell of a situation to deal with."

"Not helped by the fact that we're currently flying in the dark," sighed Coraline, leaning her head into his chest. "You'd think that we'd have more information on the Tantibalic Tendency than 'Twisted bastards who blow things up and leave their contact details.'"

"The who? Their what?"

"Cards. They leave … oh, screw it." Coraline pulled her head back. "Let's not talk about my day. I'll have all of tomorrow and the days after it to deal with my day. Let's talk about your non-productive day. That'll cheer me up."

"Let's do that," agreed Maria. "Also? We're very strange people when this is the sort of thing that cheers us up."

Wybie and Maria took it in turns to explain their findings and lack thereof to Coraline, who sat upright in her chair and kept her expression guarded as they spoke. Beyond the window at her back, thunder rolled across a sky from which the rainfall was continually increasing. Lightning briefly flashed, a swift stroke of cold white in the depths of the dark sky.

"Well, as long as there's still things you can pursue," said Coraline. "I suppose there's a sort of comfort in not being the only one left in the dark."

"It's just a waiting game for information now," said Maria. "We've got a department and a team of researchers making their way to the base as we speak. You've got multiple government agencies and the combined efforts of the world's intelligence networks. A slight disparity, but not one that working in anyone's disfavour."

"Something will come to us," agreed Coraline. "If it doesn't come to us, our people'll seek it out. And they're working with good odds."

"That's the hope," said Wybie, regarding the view out the window, out into the darkness and rain a few inches from his nose. "I do enjoy a bit of hope every now and then."


	7. Drums

They were still in the Oval Office when the first sirens sounded.

They started distantly, quietly; too quietly to be heard past the thick walls and the rolling din of the storm. It took almost half a minute before the sound of them registered with Coraline.

"Hold it, just a second," she said suddenly, motioning for silence and cutting Wybie off mid-story. "What's that sound? Am I just hearing things?"

"I … no, I can hear something as well," said Maria, frowning. "Is it an alarm, do you think?"

"If it is, it's not from in here," said Coraline, rising to her feet and steadying herself on the Resolute Desk as she turned to the window, with nothing apparent beyond the by-now customary rushing darkness and the distant lights of vehicles and ascending buildings. "Must be from another building."

"I don't think so," said Wybie cautiously. "It's just that … one time, I was playing with some of the spare hardware used around here, don't ask why, and there's a few sounds you pick up quickly when you keep on triggering them at point-blank range."

"Then what do you think it is."

Wybie hesitated. "It sounds like one of the perimeter alarms."

And as soon as he had said it, the nearest office building to the White House went up in fire.

The force of it rattled the window, sheets of erupting flame ripping open brick walls and sending shrapnel lashing out in all directions like a million molten-metal comets. The clap came sharper and piercing than any lightning-strike, and hard on its heels came redoubled sirens, and distant shouting and the low wail of motorguns.

"What the _hell_?" Coraline recoiled from the window, her eye wide at the red light spilling across the south lawn and the Ellipse. One hand flew reflexively to her side, grabbing at nothing for a few futile moments. Wybie and Maria stepped back as well, their own expressions wide and alarmed.

The shouting grew in volume, and there came the soft-yet-shrill chatter of small-arms fire. Screams began to edge into the growing cacophony, from the direction of the fire and from what seemed like other distant points to the sides. Thick, truculent smoke crowned the eruption, staining the pitch sky darker..

At the edges of the observable, grown in the sudden influx of the fire-cast light, man-sized dark figures moved with purpose.

"God have mercy," said Maria, her face anxious and drawn as she turned to face Coraline. "What ..who _is_ it?"

Coraline opened her mouth to reply, but stopped abruptly as some strange sensation took hold of her. It was faint, and unearthly, and yet familiar, and all too, _too_ familiar for that matter…

…But the possibility that occurred instinctively to Coraline was impossible, it had to be, nobody could possibly induce that over so great an area so suddenly, and she (not entirely) dismissed it…

…And no sooner had she done so than another building, further off into the city, half-covered by other rising buildings, erupted into a silent gout of fire, flecks of flying stone visible even from Coraline's perspective.

The door to the Oval Office slammed open, and Hawkwood strode in, flanked by six other suited agents, three to a side. He seemed sharpened, his movements controlled and tense, his mouth taut and flat and his right hand held near the inside pocket of his coat.

"Madam President, we're under attack," he said simply, the words clipped and forceful. "We're evacuating the building and getting you to safety. _Now."_

"Who's attacking us, Mr Hawkwood?" asked Coraline, keeping herself composed, feeling old, slightly rusty nerves asserting steel in the face of danger (and as a voice in the back of her head said, with a touch of what Coraline considered inappropriately detached sarcasm, "Well, gee. Who do you know of that's acquired a taste for attacking heads of state in the last while?")

"We don't know, and right now, we've got to focus on surviving," said Hawkwood irritably. He beckoned with one hand to the agents at his left and with the other to Wybie and Maria. "Mr Lovat, Secretary Ortega, you come with us as well. There are saferooms in the building. Come on. And keep your heads down."

They complied, the gunfire and shouts from inside growing louder. Maria stepped forward, Coraline following her, Wybie bringing up the rear as the agents closed around them.

The strange familiar sensation returned to Coraline, alien, she finally realised, only for its presence in this place of all places, filling her nostrils with the softly strengthening scent of…

…honeysuckle.

"Falchion, Firework, and Burdock retrieved and en route to Location Sigma," Hawkwood snapped into his headset, his voice raised to compensate for the growing clamour inside the building and the noise from outside, as the Secret Service agents bustled the three out of the room and out through Moloney's empty office at a brisk pace. They turned sharply through a door on their left and emerged into a length of wide corridor. "Patterns acknowledged and revised. ETA, two…"

And what Hawkwood was about to say remained unsaid, because at that moment the world exploded.

The force hit Coraline before the noise or heat or rubble, a sheer solid wall that slammed into her and sent her flying backwards, leaving her only aware in the vaguest terms of Wybie and Maria and several agents sprawling next to her on the floor before light and thunder momentarily drowned out her senses, leaving her stunned and prostrate.

Slowly, by fragments, the world reasserted itself amidst noise and vertigo-inducing light, as she pushed herself painfully up into a sitting position. She saw that at the end of the stretch of corridor was an empty shattered space where the wall had previously stood, the floor strewn with rubble and scorch-marks. Rain and fire-light spilled in from where the building had been ripped open. Emergency lighting, acting in place of whatever wires had been ripped apart in the blast of whatever weapon had caused it, painted the corridor carmine, reds blazing against pools of shadow.

Hawkwood, who had been a few feet in front of Coraline, but still some distance from the point of the detonation, lay on his side, breathing heavily but without too much labour. He tremblingly pushed one hand against the ground to shove himself upwards, the other snaking up and adjusting his askew sunglasses.

"Sh…shit," he managed, managing with some superhuman effort to rise to his feet, stopping his speech every so often to cough with shock. "That…that way's gone. They'll have an open angle of fire on us."

He looked behind him, just as Coraline reached out to the recovering Wybie and Maria, helping them pull themselves up to a sitting position as well, and accepting their help as they stood up and pulled her upright. Around them, the other agents were standing, trying to regain their composure and purpose.

The scent of honeysuckle suddenly redoubled, and what could only be described as the feel of the Sur-real rose sickeningly in Coraline, almost making her retch with the strength of it. It was _wrong_, it wasn't normally this strong, even in a full-blown Eroder field with a beldam next to her.

"Right," said Hawkwood. "We cut through cross-building. Takeda, Schroder, take point for the office route. Madam President, behind me…"

Coraline could only half-listen, something drawing her eyes to the hole left in the far wall, beyond which a small angle of viewing was possible. On the lawn, where red clashed with the harsh blue-white light of a lightning strike for illumination, she saw the same dark outlines of people moving towards them, towards the White House, sleek weapons spitting sharp cross-lines through the air at unseen targets. A swath of motorgun fire backed up by pistol rounds caught several of them, pitching them onto the grass, and other stooped to return fire, white-hot rounds zigzagging through the air.

A shadow flicked past.

Only briefly. Almost too quickly to be seen, too quickly to be discerned, nothing but a brief black patch in the world that streaked towards whatever defences the Secret Service and White House guards elsewhere had mustered…

The honeysuckle stench, the sheer sickly-sweet corrupt _rank_, suddenly became too strong for Coraline to bear. Her knees bent abruptly as she gasped, and Wybie was quick to support her before she fell, his face and Maria's betraying something the same sudden revulsion.

"Mr Hawkwood," Coraline managed, regaining what strength she could to pull away slightly from Wybie and stand unassisted. "A psychephage's involved. Do you or any of the agents have ferroshot?"

Hawkwood blinked, looking only briefly at Coraline with some uncertainty, and glanced back along the corridor to where another route of escape lay. He had felt something, Coraline could tell. _Anyone_ could have felt something of that.

"Cross-building," he repeated, as if to keep himself on track. "We can get ferroshot from the caches. Come on, this way…"

Sudden, violent, deafeningly loud shots punched through the wall at the moment, stabbing irregular holes along the top of the walls, bullets rebounding and falling to the floor. Thunder pealed down the corridor, and from somewhere further away in the building, the sound of screaming pierced past all other sounds.

"Into the goddamn building!" shouted Hawkwood, drawing his gun and motioning back along the corridor. "They're hitting us from both sides of the building! Sani and Menzies, with me on the rearguard! The rest of you, get the President to Location Sigma!" A hand appeared past the shattered wall, its ceramic armour plating black in the red light, and Hawkwood's first shot knocked its grasp free with a cry of pain from the recipient.

"This way," said agent Schroder with an understated firmness, motioning for the others to follow him through left-leading doors. "Through the office space." He wrenched open the door leading to an expanse of office space, filled with glass-and-pine cubicle walls, solid wooden doors and screened walls separating the wide room from the offices around the edge. The wires here were undecided, the light shifting every few seconds from soft white to simmering red, the shadows warping with each shift.

Coraline did as directed, slowly coming used to the Sur-real rank after the initial hammer-blow, getting her mind thinking furiously as she scrambled along. Another resounding boom came from far off, seeming to rattle the building, and she was aware of Schroder swearing with shock and the rattle of gunfire in the corridor they had left behind.

"Sur-real field covering the grounds," she panted. "Attack with mixed human and psychephage forces- what sort of psychephage?"

"It has to be powerful," replied Wybie, joining the one-sided conversation. "Powerful enough that a safe room might not be enough to keep it out – not if it could rip the door right off or burn a way through or turn itself gaseous and seep in."

"Then we need weapons and ferroshot," said Maria. "Steel-jacketed rounds won't be enough against something as powerful as that."

The sound of screaming rose suddenly again, redoubled in strength and desperation since the first time it had happened, from what seemed like a number of throats. Schroder, Takeda, and the other agents pressed on, shepherding the three around the outskirts.

"Mr Schroder, we're sharing this building with another psychephage." Coraline injected every note of authority and assurance she could into her voice. "It can't be stopped with normal rounds. You _need_ to get ferroshot. There's a cache in the East Wing by the Ambassador's Chamber, but there'll be some in the Secret Service cache by the stairs..."

"I _need_ to get you to a safe location, and if retrieving appropriate ammunition distracts from that, then we make do with normal shot," said Scroder, overriding Takeda's softly-spoken support.

"The stair cache's right _on_ the Sigma route…" hissed Coraline, but she never got to finish the sentence before a door before them flew in, smashed off its hinges, followed by a dark figure spraying blazing rounds from a weapon in their grasp.

Several of the rounds chopped through one of the agents, and were replied to with concerted and nigh-instantaneous fire from the others, the rounds hammering off the black ceramic-weave armour and sending the figure reeling back before a lucky round punched into a weak area at their throat, putting them down with a heavy thud. But behind them, more attackers loomed, raising their own weapons.

The room became a chopping, churning storm of noise and fury in that instant, the agents dropping and crouching to return fire, with Schroder all but tackling the three to get them out of the way, shoving them to the floor behind a cubicle wall to their right. Rounds smashed through the floor beside Coraline, punching ragged holes through the carpet and floorboards scant inches from her right hand. She leaned oblivious to the danger on her blind side, mind trying to process all the chaotic and disparate input at once.

Wybie shouted, and she didn't hear him. Maria spoke, and she didn't hear her past the din all around them. Adrenaline erupted in her, filling her up with some replenishing fire from the inside.

Making everything sharper.

Everything simpler.

Everything _alive_.

She twisted where she sat, snatching for a gun from where it had fallen from its user's spasming grip, ignoring Wybie's frantic shouts. She pulled back with it, checking that it was loaded, that it was comfortable for her grip, and that she could support it with one hand. She leaned sharply around the cubicle corner, snapping off a shot that struck across one of the attackers' ankles, recoil sending the next several into the wall. She just as quickly pulled back again as return shots ripped open the floor beside her. Shouts and orders in words she didn't recognise passed her by as she prepared to fire again.

Another explosion seemed to rip through the building, this time from a closer distance, and the cubicle walls pitched and swayed, many of them toppling altogether. The Sur-real stink rose again with renewed potency as fresh screams filtered through, and Coraline fell back against the other two as one of the dark-armoured attackers lunged past a stricken agent, weapon raised and ready to fire as Coraline cursed and tried to realign her own weapon, too slowly, surely too late.

Shots hammered into the figure from the side, hurling the attacker to the ground in a black-and-red tangled mess, and Coraline turned her head to see Hawkwood and Sani charging in from the corridor, their faces drawn and clothes smeared and battered, two handguns blazing in Hawkwood's grasp. The attackers out in the open found themselves outnumbered and attacked from all directions, and Coraline pushed herself forward, her own shots slashing out, lost amidst the others. They fell back, covering themselves as best they could, aided by the strikes against their armour.

The world spun, slowly becoming fragmented as the fire in her veins faded, and Coraline absently noticed a spot of white on the floor next to one of the fallen attackers. A card, with **TT** marked out on it, which couldn't at this stage come as a surprise.

"That was _too_ close," breathed Hawkwood, striding over to Coraline. "Who's hurt? Who's down?" His gaze scanned the floor, flicking over the wreckage and focusing on the bodies of the two downed agents. He bit briefly at his lip and then turned to Coraline. "Madam President?"

"I'm not hurt," managed Coraline, the post-adrenaline high fading and the flashing lights adding to her nausea. "Neither's Wybie or Maria. Is anyone…?"

"Schroder and Warsi here and Menzies back in the corridor, and four of theirs," said Hawkwood, the words controlled and forcedly-calm. "But they're attacking us from all directions, with several dozen bodies with high-quality small arms. We've got to keep moving. And you may as well keep that gun. The safe house entrance's just down the stairs."

Coraline paused to help up Wybie and Maria, both of whom were familiar with the rush of fighting but who had been unable to act on it, and who were unsettled and tense as a result.

And, Coraline admitted, she hadn't been entirely ready for this either. She had always brought arms to bear psychephages, against creatures that … well, weren't human. That had hurt people. The bodies on the floor were something new, and tied a knot inside her, and she kept her gaze away from them as best she could.

"Just … just down the stairs," she muttered. "Ha, I can do this. Just down this corridor, right? From where they'd come." She put one foot in front of the other, and hesitated.

The Sur-real stink had pulsed again, always in lock-step with the chattering of gunfire and bursts of screams elsewhere in the building, each time growing closer to their position.

"And while we're at it, _please_ get ferroshot from the stair cache," she said. "The psychephage in this building's almost certainly not going to run from normal rounds. _It's_ causing those screams. _Listen_."

"I hear them," Hawkwood said distractedly. "Sani, take point. Takeda, retrieve the ferroshot from the cache when we reach the stair top. Let's go."

They moved off, stepping over the fallen Tantibalics, the agents moving with their weapons ready, Coraline motioning for Wybie and Maria to pick up weapons for themselves. The short corridor's lights weren't plagued, instead projecting a steady glow utterly at odds with the pandaemonium of the previous room.

The door at the end opened onto the room holding the top of the staircase, whole and unmarked save for a bullet-shattered window. Takeda moved quickly to a painting on the wall facing down towards the stairway. He prised it off and set it down, fiddling with the lock on a revealed compartment while the other agents moved to the side of the rail, angling their weapons down along the stairway and towards the middle landing. The lights in the room likewise worked, but the landing below was cast in shadow.

Coraline took a moment to breath, trying to ignore the growing sickly clamminess. Wybie unselfconsciously checked and re-checked his gun, while Maria paced in the absence of any movement onwards.

"What's the holdup, Mr Takeda?" Hawkwood called after a few minutes. Lightning cracked again outside, making Maria jump, while the distant noise within the White House had settled to a constant rolling background din of shots and shouting and the odd rumble.

"Almost …there, got it," said Takeda triumphantly, opening the compartment to reveal stacked layers of ammunition and weapons, pistols and shotguns and compact motor rifles carefully arranged, with first-aid kits and assorted other equipment in other levels.

"Distribute the ferroshot," said Hawkwood, now on edge as the honeysuckle stink became even more pronounced. Coraline moved forward to procure some, distracted.

Too distracted, just enough to miss the brief flicker of a shadow at the very edge of vision.

A whip of pitch-darkness blurred up from the stairs and slashed into Takeda in less than a heartbeat, clenching into him before anyone could react, and snapping back with one smooth movement, swiping him away from the compartment even as he clawed at the air and screamed, blood misting out of his mouth as he was dragged with unstoppable force down the stairs, hands ripping futilely at the carpeted steps.

"Takeda!" screamed Hawkwood, and he and the other agents opened a volley of fire at the black tendril, shots punching at the floor around it and Takeda, too inaccurate, too late. Takeda was whipped around the edge of the lower landing with a final coherent scream, and blood slashed out in an arc from the unseen point.

Despite's Hawkwood's shouted order to hold their position, one of the agents recoiled, trembling, and the other, Sani, outright vaulted over the railing, shouting Takeda's name. He shouted it once, and then again, only getting halfway through it the second time before it turned into a wet, toneless gurgle. Something ripped in the darkness, and the gurgle in turn stopped.

"To the cache!" shouted Coraline, the fire reignited in a sudden rush of exhilaration and fury, springing on instinct for the compartment now that she _had_ an enemy she could fight, now that some _thing_ had killed two of her people before her. She grabbed at a shotgun and threw it and a handful of the ferroshot rounds in the top right layer of ammunition behind her, trusting Wybie or Maria to get it. She snatched into turn at the pistols, tossing two behind her and keeping on in her grasp, reaching again for more of the weapons.

"Cover the President!" came Hawkwood's call, and he hurled himself in front of Coraline, both handguns held out and aimed down the stairway at whatever waited, seeing nothing but a shadowed landing adorned with lines of blood. Wybie grabbed the shotgun up from the ground and swiftly chambered ferroshot into it, Maria and the other agent grabbed for the pistols.

This time, the psychephage didn't take the direct route.

The shadows on the landing's facing wall twitched, and a shape suddenly slid up it, multi-limbed, distorted and amorphous, with all the matter of pitch-black smoke. Hawkwood opened fire at this latest incursion, shots smashing into the points where the shape had been a split second before, the sound making Coraline spin around to face it. With deathly silence and exact movements, the shape seemed to coil, to gain definite form as it rose - and then _twisted_ again, springing away from the wall and through the air, things like ragged claws and mandibles weaving into the ends of its limbs and into its torso-sized form.

-White flashed briefly as it moved through the air, a mere glimpse against the void of its form, but somehow more chilling and cold and more terrible than anything the darkness could ever hold-

-And then it was on the other agent, twisting past his first frantic shot and ripping into him as it pounced onto his chest, claws ripping at the skin of his throat and mandibles tearing up at his face, red slashing out where it struck.

"_Get it off!_" screeched the agent, falling back and flailing and screaming his lungs fit to burst with pain and terror as it tore and hunted. "_Help me!_ Getitoffgetitoff_getitoffGETITOFF_…"

One sound like _shnk_ cut off his screams of terror, and he flopped to the ground, face unrecognisable and his body limp and still as the creature sprang off him and turned to the others, a low rattling, malevolent with satisfaction and sheer _pleasure_, coming from its depths.

And in the instant that it held its position, Coraline saw the white again, two points of it at the centre of the creature's form…

And then the lights went out, the soft white flaring and flickering, discordant crimson clashing against it before clashing in turn with black as the creature lunged again.

Images flared and spun in the screaming darkness, lit by the flash of shots and the odd flare from spasmodic emergency lights, Coraline forcing herself to focus on the moving creature, not at all helped by its shapeshifting. Black lines darker than shadow extended and warped, mandibles moulding into something and filled with serrated teeth, pin-points of white shifting in position, the whole thing becoming something lupine that loped with a vicious ease, barrelling past the shots sent its way. Maria opened wild fire, several rounds of ferroshot gliding off the creature and opening white scores against its skin. It paid them little heed and hurled itself at her, teeth bared and white gleaming.

Coraline's own shot caught it, against all probability, right through what was currently its throat. It fell back with a startled hiss, white fire spitting from the wound, and Wybie opened fire with the shotgun, the spray of rounds slashing through the air and ripping into the creature, tearing open blossoming fire-bleeding wounds. The creature scuttled back, given momentum by the impact of the shot, once again producing the eerie rattle, but this time giving it a low undercurrent of fury and hate.

Several rounds of ferroshot had clipped it. Another had punched into its throat. And a full shotgun's worth had smashed right into it.

No way in _hell_ did it have any right to still be alive, thought Coraline. No way in hell could it just be _angry_.

Hawkwood opened fire with his own guns, the shots lashing into the psychephage to no effect beyond the physical impact, easily shrugged off by whatever horrific strength the creature had on its side.

The rattle resounded, and the lights above went out for good.

And then it attacked again.

It sprang up, indistinct amidst the darkness, as the guns swung up to track it, stabbing blazing light up at empty darkness to no avail before the creature descended upon Hawkwood, teeth tearing into the side of his throat, leaving him too shocked and stunned to react before some thick tendril tore out of its body and crushed around him, constricting him in less than a second, slamming his arms against his side and sending his guns clattering to the ground. He fought to regain enough breath to struggle and fight, but not enough in the brief second before the creature pulled back, hurling him to the floor and dragging him towards it, towards the corridor that led to the offices.

The three charged after it, wary of firing near the pinioned Hawkwood and trying to outrun it, to get a clearer shot. The psychephage rattled again, the noise reinfused with pleasure, and it vanished around the corner, dragging Hawkwood over the slumped bodies and out of sight, as his screams began to rise.

"After that psychephage!" shouted Coraline breaking into a sprint, hands moving automatically to reload her gun, worries forgotten, care unheeded, _everything_ focused to one blazing point of serene clarity. She _knew_ how this worked. "Come on, Department! After Hawkwood! After the damn psychephage! _Come on_!"

* * *

><p>Through the office space, over a wet floor and draped bodies and shattered glass and splintered wood, through darkness that had replaced the red lights, through the door at the other end.<p>

Through to Moloney's office, over more shattered glass and fallen chairs and torn carpeting, past a shattered window from which wild rain entered and beyond which distant fires blazed, through the other door, all but ripped off its hinges.

To the Oval Office.

Or what was left of the Oval Office.

A rocket-strike had caught it at some point when the three and the agents were attempting their escape, ripping open the south wall from floor to ceiling in a settled storm of rubble and glass and blazing wall fragments. The Resolute Desk had been sheared in half, the two pieces fallen forwards. Paintings and drawers and plants lay shattered. The much-vaunted chair had been ripped apart in the blast.

The storm hurled itself in, lightning crashing in the sky past the open wall, cold white-blue light cutting down and colliding off the darkness, save for one part.

The part that was a silhouette, human-shaped and sized, framed against the lightning strike, perched on the rise of the broken wall, which cradled Hawkwood and watched the three as they entered.

It spoke, and when it did, the timbre of its neutral, deep voice almost seemed to echo in the space. "Stormcrow," it said pleasantly. "You will stop where you are."

It was in a position to enforce that order. In two arms it had Hawkwood held securely, one wrapped around him and keeping his limp body upright, the other, with a hand as small as that of a baby's, coloured like pitch and oil, it gently caressed the line of his jaw, ignoring the low moans that came from the man.

The rest of its body was formless below the waist and human-like above it, the whole thing still the colour of shadow, saved for stretched lines of ferroshot-scarring, already fading from brilliant white to a muted grey, some parts already returned entirely to black. A head rose from a slender torso, featureless save for a mouth and eyes, the mouth a gently-curving gash filled with gleaming teeth, the eyes two angled pits of pure, soulless white.

They focused on the three, radiating dread power, the tightening of its arms across Hawkwood emphasising the point.

Coraline stopped where she was, but dropped to one knee, holding the gun out before her and levelling it at the psychephage's exposed head, aware of Wybie and Maria adopting similar poses with their own weapons.

"Let go of Director Hawkwood," she said, her voice cold and carefully level, a contrast with the creature's own unhurried tone. "Let him, and stand down. You _will _stand down."

"Shall I?" The creature appeared unconcerned. Hawkwood stirred and moaned, and it drew him in tighter, the hand by his neck gently patting him as it crooned softly to him, in the manner of something comforting a terrified child, settling him into quiet sobbing.

"If you don't, there won't be enough left of you to fucking _bury_," hissed Coraline, keeping the gun straight. "All your friends are dead or run off, by the sounds of it." And it was true; for no other gunfire had come from in or near the White House for a few moments past, though noise still rolled in from the outside world. "We outnumber you. You're in our sights. Let – Hawkwood - _go_."

The creature's cold eyes regarded her silently, with what almost seemed like mild amusement, as the hand at Hawkwood's neck suddenly jabbed into it, at a point that was red with blood. He screamed and started forward, easily restrained by the creature which pulled him back and resumed the reassuring stroking and crooning, drinking in Hawkwood's helpless panic.

"Yet you have nothing with which to threaten me," the creature said reflectively. "Your weaponry hurt, but it didn't wound, and its hurt did not even last. So why should I let him go, when I can so easily rip the soul from him - and tear each of you apart - and leave here having done exactly what I wished?"

"If you could so easily do that, you would have done it by now," Coraline replied fiercely.

The creature paused, considering the words, its hand still tapping against Hawkwood's neck. "A fair argument."

Its smile curved more sharply, its body became tensed - and then it _acted_.

The fingers of the hand at Hawkwood's neck lengthened suddenly, the thumb and the fingers arcing around to meet each other tip to tip at his collar bone. They pulled, trailing strands of grey thread that thickened and coiled around each other into rope, rope that turned into a noose that rose and tightened around Hawkwood's throat as the psychephage pulled its arm free. Hawkwood kicked and screamed, but before he or the three could do anything, the creature stretched out with its other arm, sending Hawkwood flying right at the three.

Coraline didn't react quickly enough, and Hawkwood collided with her, knocking the breath from her and smashing her into the floor, making the world spin. She tried to fight her way, sucking in desperate breathes – which caught in her throat when she saw Hawkwood's face.

The noose was left around his throat, and was tightening and writhing of its own volition, sucking out his life and soul, his face desiccating and wrinkling sharply as his screams thinned and died down to a splutter, before dying away altogether.

The most triumphant, insidious rattle yet came from the creature, and it casually stepped forward, legs forming out of the formless shadow of its lower body, all traces of wounds on its form vanishing at the sudden influx of Hawkwood's soul. One hand reached out towards the fallen Coraline.

Wybie fired first, white-hot lines of ferroshot ripping through the air and raking into the creature, which barely turned as one of its arms swatted out and struck away Wybie with bone-breaking force, smashing him into the wall. It moved on, white fire stitching up its side and the angry rattle sounding again.

Coraline heaved Hawkwood's body off her, grabbing for her fallen gun, striving to get to it before the creature reached her. Past her desperation and concern for Wybie and her growing fear of the _thing_ approaching her, she heard the click of an empty gun coming from Maria's direction.

A split second later, there came Maria herself.

She lunged in, smashing her gun's barrel right across the psychephage's face, knocking it back slightly and drawing a hiss of startled pain from it. She kept up the attack, bringing the gun back up and overhead, intending to bring it down on the creature, before the blow was suddenly arrested by one of the creature's outheld arms. For a second, she held that position, unyielding and straining against the immovable arm.

The creature's other arm, lengthened fingers writhing at the end of it, struck out in a blur, cracking into her upper body and sharply folding her as she was hurled back into the wall.

The creature hissed in mixed-parts pain and satisfaction, and turned back to Coraline.

Who had retrieved her gun.

The trigger blurred and snapped, and shot after shot within the space of a second ripped point-blank into the creature's head in a rush of flaring white fire, blasting out one eye, and wreaking hell across the darkness. The creature _screeched_, a sound of pure anguished fury, and tore forward, blind and raging, and Coraline sprang back from the threshing arms. Her next shot punched right through its centre of mass, and the creature wobbled, briefly, Coraline hardly daring to hope it would finally fall.

It stopped there, and slowly raised its head to regard Coraline with its remaining eye, dark stitching flowing around the white fire to arrest and heal the wounds. It was bristling with anger, with almost uncontrollable fury, but when it next spoke, some note of calculation was holding it back, some occurred notion demanding attention and holding it back.

"The question of what shall ultimately prove the more satisfying has occurred," it purred, in a tone as cold and deadly as a naked blade. "For your flock to be leaderless, without that which could give hope, set adrift in fear-"

Coraline fired again, the round slashing through the air as the creature stepped aside, one of its hands grabbing and seizing hold of the pistol, wrenching it upwards to point uselessly at the ceiling.

"-Or…" And here, it became truly thoughtful, the rage all but gone. "To see their greatest defence and hope _fail_, slowly. For even her knowledge and power to be futile in the face of every attack, and for terror to take them with no recourse, with no hope of another arising…"

The gun was wrenched free of Coraline's grip and crushed into powder and shredded metal in the thing's hand. Coraline kicked out, her foot striking against what might as well have been a steel lamppost, and the creature swiped out, striking her dismissively to the ground, fireworks exploding in her skull at the impact. Above her, made a blur by the pain, the creature rose, white eyes cold and amused.

"Once your world is nothing, once everything you ever fought for is in ashes, once you are _alone_," it said, "Then I may bother to return for you."

It turned and stepped away, through the shattered office, over rubble and remains, its passage silent, the sound of its departure only that of the whisper of raindrops as a shadow passed through them.

Coraline slowly rose, her head thick and reeling, seeing that beyond, fires blazed at points in the city. Lightning still arced and crackled in the sky.

Turning to her left, she saw Wybie pulling himself up against the wall, wincing and gasping, clutching himself in the manner of someone with multiple things broken inside him. He twisted his head painfully, meeting her gaze and trying to heave himself upright, using the wall as an insufficient support.

And to her right…

"Maria?" called Coraline, her voice a croak. "_Maria?_"

Maria was slumped against the wall. Blood blossomed out of three ragged holes in her upper body, points where the creature's claws had bored right through her. Her mouth opened and closed, blood starting to trickle out in thin rivulets, her eyes wide and frantic with pain.

Pain ceased to matter. "_Maria!_" Coraline pulled herself up, staggering over to Maria's side, her hands fumbling off her coat and tugging for any give, anything that could be ripped away and turned into a bandage, anything to stop that _blood_. She dropped to her knees beside Maria, one finger rushing to her neck to check for a pulse while her other continued to worry at the coat.

"That … I can't … doesn't, ah, make _sense_…" Every other word that came out of Maria's mouth was indistinct, wet and toneless save for slight confusion. "Can't…doesn't…"

"Maria, stay with us_. Stay with us!_ You're going to be okay if you hang on, once we get a medic, and you'll get to return _so_ many favours to whatever the hell that was. Stay, _please_! _Wybie, call for a goddam medic! Where are the medics?_"

"…Fear," came the whisper. "…_That_ would make sense. Can't think why … not before …" Her eyes turned up towards Coraline, confused and swimming. "It doesn't…"

Behind her, Wybie's voice boomed for a medic, indistinct in his own pain but still strong. Coraline paid it little attention.

"Doesn't…" came Maria's voice, soft and getting softer. "Doesn't … damn it, ah, _doesn't_ … does…"

She took a ragged breath, while lightning crashed and Wybie called frantically and Coraline implored her to keep going.

She took another ragged breath.

She stopped.

The flashes of light from the dark sky cut down in cold slivers across the ruined office, shining over fragments of glinting glass, over the droplets of blood on the floor, over the people and the bodies inside. On Wybie, standing with a gasp of pain and several laboured steps, over Coraline, wide-eyed and unbelieving. Over Hawkwood, his form shrunken, wrinkled, cold. And over Maria, her body slumped, her front red, her open eyes staring at nothing at all.


	8. Decrescendo

Morning came. It was hard to tell past the smoke.

Over parts of the city it still hung; an acridic miasma that drifted like an oil-slick. A few fires still fed it, still leaking red flames that gouted black smoke and exuding the pungent stink of chemicals into the air. Skeletal buildings lay shattered around these fires in heaps of crumbled masonry and pillars of twisted metal, chalk-white dust covering them like shrouds.

Sirens still wailed, and what parts of the city hadn't been hit as badly had found themselves made into refugee centres, with parks repurposed to hold rows upon rows of emergency tents and aid sites. What hospitals remained intact were full and getting fuller with each hour. Bands of yellow-and-black stretched across whole streets and avenues, writing across them reading _Quarantine – No Entry._

Helicopters and police hovercrafts droned. Armed soldiers stood on street corners, faces hollow with weary horror. At ground level, people stumbled or sobbed or sought out others or walked as if in a dumb haze.

In the earliest part of this morning, soldiers swarmed over Capitol Hill and other government buildings, many of which had been ripped open. Although most of one side of the Capitol building lay in rubble, groups of senators and congressmen still filed in, their determination , for all it had been kicked down by shock and despair, remained ignited by some bitter mixture of defiance and spite.

In the earliest hours of whatever pitiful light made it past the overhanging shadow, the President and First Gentleman, Coraline Jones and Wybie Lovat, were in the Rose Garden, shards of shattered wall and pulped plants scattered across the previously-pristine lawn.

Those who knew little of the President might have assumed she was recovering from the shock and planning the country's response. Those who knew of her reputation might have guessed that she was forcing herself to direct her anger and energy towards a plan to destroy whoever (or whatever) had acted last night.

Those who knew her better and the only other one in the Garden with her knew she wept brokenly.

* * *

><p>A few minutes, as shades of black crept towards grey and as shadows etched themselves out of the sparse light-<p>

"We…we ought to make arrangements. Did she have anyone else who…?"

"…No. She w… was married to her job. She had a few hobbies and groups, maybe some people there would know…"

"Know more than _us_?"

Silence, broken by faint birdsong and distant wailing.

"This isn't real."

"It shouldn't be."

"It's … it can't have just…"

"It shouldn't have."

"I need to deal with this. People will need me. I can't … I have to ask questions as well."

"Of…?"

"Of you-know-who."

Silence. Then,

"I could…"

"No. She's _mine_. Besides, you'll be busy with other things."

"Nowhere near as busy as you'll be…"

"I'll make time for this. I'm going to make sure of it. And you're needed for other things."

"Like what?"

"Like figuring out why that thing wasn't killed by ferroshot, and how we can do it _properly_ next time."

Silence, broken by Wybie gently kissing Coraline.

"I can do that. And I can … I can make arrangements."

"Thank you. I wish I could help with that, but…" A sharp buzzing from Coraline's coat pocket cut her off. "God _damn_ it, I can't. I need to go. I … I need to deal with this. All of this."

* * *

><p>There were bunkers beneath the city, beneath the streets and compacted earth and concrete, remains of old and justified paranoia. Bases from which government could continue in times like these.<p>

In hours that crept by like a rusted pendulum-

"Tell me everything," came the calm command of Coraline Jones, who in that moment was not permitting herself to be Coraline, to be anything but the _President_, for fear of any crack in that mask leading to despair, paralysis, to inaction and destruction.

The people around the table in the new Situation Room, after half of the old one turning to shards and flaming rubble, were wearing their own masks. The Director of the FBI and the Secretary of Homeland Security were both conspicuous by their absence, their positions filled by their deputies. Others were nursing plastered cuts and marks. Vice-President Bernstein was there as well, his gaunt face more drawn than usual. Whatever homecoming he'd been expecting, this probably hadn't been it.

"They didn't hold back," said the CIA Director, her own mask slipping briefly as the words came, confused and appalled. "They … they had nothing holding them back."

"The first strike on the Ethernet Centre took place a few minutes before midnight," started the recently-succeeded Secretary of Homeland Security. "Successive strikes on other network nodes and communication centres were timed to fall within thirty seconds of the first. They used remote bombs, and employed the strikes as signals for the next phase of their attack."

A clock, an old and all-but obsolete physical model, clicked away to itself on one pale wall. It was part of the sterile and cold background, an ignored detail, as much as it invited attention away from the Secretary's words.

"While the White House was struck, they had other armed agents waiting by the bomb sites, waiting for the emergency services – police, fire services, ambulances, the usual responders. When they arrived, the Tantibalics opened fire. Indiscriminately. Dozens dead within the first minute, rising into the hundreds in the next few minutes. They'd gutted the ranks of those who might have been able to help for – for what followed."

"And what followed?" Barely a tremor, which, a tiny and cynical and detached part of Coraline's mind couldn't help but think deserved a medal for Herculean self-control.

"After that first slaughter, they triggered remote bombs at – Jesus, everywhere. Several dozen locations throughout the city. Everywhere there was people. Hospitals. Bars. Care homes. Military installations. Most of them hadn't evacuated, weren't anticipating it, weren't – people died. Hundreds. More than hundreds."

"That wasn't all."

"They had no more than maybe a hundred agents, but they were all armed. They took to the streets – there were gunfights – fire on crowds – they forced an evacuation, they forced troops to deploy from the Maryland and Virginia bases, rapid responders in guncutters and fighter rockets. The Tantibalics clashed briefly with some of the first companies on the scene, but their main forces withdrew shortly after the vanguard arrived. Most of them vanished outright. We don't where they could be hiding; we haven't found any ditched weapons or armour."

"Sur-real exits," said the President, ideas coming together. "They were working with a psychephage."

"…Whatever they were working with, it wasn't the last stage of their operation. They saved their worst for last."

"What did they do?"

"By the time the bulk of their combatants had been killed or had fled, huge sections of the populace in the areas hit had been evacuated, as controlled as we could get it. They … they were cramped together in streets and in parks, panicking, in the thousands. The Tantibalics … they had a few people left waiting, plain-clothes. Waiting for a suicide attack, with concealed canisters."

"Canisters of what?"

"Sarin."

The table fell silent.

"What … what was the final casualty count?" managed the cracking President.

"Not yet accounted. We passed ten thousand half an hour ago, and the reports are still coming in."

The table recovered, and then resumed discussion. They debated, quickly, anxiously, over possible communication, over deployment of military force, over what allies were both capable of giving help and unlikely to be compromised. Orders were sent out via the waiting generals several times in the space of a few minutes.

It wasn't until halfway through that the reports from New York Chicago, Austin, and the West Complex came in.

The fires in Washington had mirrors across the country.

And after that, reports from other nations filtered through.

_Once everything you ever fought for is in ashes…_

Piss off and _die_, a part of Coraline willed at the memory and creature behind it, even as another part of her huddled itself away, shutting out the world.

* * *

><p>The Thaddeus Complex stood, the years only having made it ever more complicated and obtuse and non-Euclidean in layout. It had escaped much of the damage done, having been passed over in favour of other government buildings and people on the street, though several windows lay shattered on the lawn around it. No lights shone from its windows, the only sign of life from the outside being two Secret Service agents outside the front door.<p>

Deep within the building, lit by what passed through a dusty skylight, Wybie leaned on his desk.

His own independent Centre for Sur-real Research had shared the space with the Department of the Sur-real for the past couple of years, the Centre a paper-thin compromise when people had started making concerned noises about a First Spouse's direct involvement in an arm of the government. The same people had worked there, exchanged work and information with their counterparts, and had filled the building. But today, it seemed like he would have the place to himself.

A pity it wasn't doing him any good, for all that he tried to pull his thoughts out of a dark malaise.

Soft raindrops pattered. Papers on his desk rustled as he went through the motions of shuffling through them. They shared space with pens and post-its and an old cable telephone, the nature of the building's research discouraging the use of electronic equipment. A whiteboards hung from the wall before him, a few scribbles winding down it.

The biggest electrical piece in the room, a small television balanced precariously atop a stump of a cabinet, was flashing images of the address Coraline was giving at that moment. Wybie gave it much of his attention.

"…We cannot afford division now, not when we have lost so much and stand to lose so much more," crackled the perpetually-faulty inbuilt speakers. "Now, more than ever, we must stand together. To give in to fear, to break to their will, to go mad with paranoia and grief will give the Tantibalic Tendency _exactly_ what they want."

There was genuine emotion in her voice, and that was no surprise. Wybie yearned to be there with her, a face she knew and loved on the other side of the camera, a shoulder ready for afterwards.

But she needed to be there. And she…

He turned anew to his assembled notes.

"Every nation in the world has lost its people to the Tantibalic Tendency. And from this moment on, _no nation loses another_. We will unite, we will root out every branch and cell of the Tantibalic Tendency, and we _will_ defeat them."

…She needed _him_ to be here, finding the world a weapon.

And it was exactly this frame of mind he needed to be in that duty had just pushed him towards, where he had a mystery to be approached and cracked open through the application of sheer industrial-grade _knowledge_.

Snatching a pen from the desk, he yanked off the lid with his teeth and swiftly scribed across the whiteboard, lines appearing around a diagram of something crude and be-tentacled.

_The ferroshot we used yesterday was standard-grade_, thought Wybie, as he absently gave the tentacled creature buckteeth and glasses, _And the thing was hurt, certainly, but no more than it would have been had it been any other psychephage and we'd used alloyed shot. The shot hurt, but didn't leave lasting wounds._

_Possibility One: It's a Sur-real creature, but not as we know it. It's of a different Sur-real family altogether, or it might be a crossbreed of something real and Sur-real. That's why the ferroshot didn't affect it as normal._

He did a smaller, cruder blob of tentacles to one side, giving it an eye on a stalk for good measure, before scribbling out the mass of scribbles.

_However, it hasn't shown any abilities that don't denote a psychephage. It's got shapeshifting, appearing in a Sur-real infused environment, soul-feeding, token items – the noose? – it could just be seriously powerful. We don't know of any other denizens in the Sur-real beyond psychephages, and we shouldn't presume there are until shown evidence. We know it's impossible for Sur-real and real beings to produce offspring._

_Possibility Two… _He drew a small bullet-shape, crossed it out, and then drew a much bigger bullet next to it. _We're not hitting it hard enough._

The possibility had a rudimentary appeal, Wybie had to concede. And some part of it seemed to ring true. If it was hurt by normal ferroshot, then it would just be a matter of maximising the hurt. But how to do so? The jacket for standard ferroshot was as close to pure iron as could be gotten, and the weapons they had used yesterday were models that packed metric shitloads of punch into relatively small packages.

He looked at the whiteboard, and doodled a circle, his mind churning over theories like iron vapour, motorgun batteries loaded with ferroshot, heavy-impact sniper shots, explosives…

His pen strayed back to the circle, and dashed a line through it.

He regarded the line. After a few minutes, he gave it another one for company.

Gears churned inside the parts of him that thought technical problems to death, while the ideas-part of him thought, with no little satisfaction, _Oh, yes. That could work well_, while his hands blurred out and filled the blank space of the whiteboard with line upon line.

* * *

><p>Her address over, Coraline caught a few minutes to herself in a disused room somewhere in the labyrinth below the city, a room that had seen service as a vault and which still held empty racks and shelves.<p>

She was shattered, and had all but begged Bernstein to just … manage people along while she took a few minutes out. He had nodded with quiet determination, and had pulled a long package out for her.

"It's the present from Spain," he had said, care rising in him as it always did, over whether or not it was appropriate at the moment and how he was coming across. "I didn't get a chance to give it to you yesterday and now … well, I can't say it's worth much. But for whatever it is worth…"

She had understood, and had been grateful. She still had it, sliding the weight of the package from hand to hand, leaving it still untouched.

She felt numb. This wasn't a situation any President, any human being should experience at any sort of degree. And for all it had left her broken before, she feared that the full weight of it would register at any moment, and leave her as nothing at all.

And if she feared that, then it was a real fear. Because she was the wrong person in the exact wrong position at the exact wrong moment, who had to be the support for everyone else, and nobody could afford her breaking. She had to be a leader; she couldn't put her problems before those of others. Nobody could afford her self-pity or paralysing despair.

And yet, noted some bitter part of her, here she was, in a room by herself, palming responsibility onto another while the world screamed for aid.

The darkness of the place she was in had only rarely been rivalled in all her life, and all she could do was pick at the edge of the wrapping for the arm-length package.

A strip fell away, revealing an equally sized cardboard tube, sparking some small amount of curiosity in her. She pulled the tube free of the paper, and prised open one end. A long cuboid container slid out, of dark and polished wood hinged with brass along one side. She slowly opened it, and raised one brow when she saw what lay within.

A falchion, her codename-namesake, a curving, thick-bladed sword with a carefully engraved hilt and crossguard, lay nestled amidst the silk lining. Writing in the silk read **Toledo Swordsmiths - Un Corte Arriba**.

She pulled it free, shifting it gently in her grip. It wasn't as heavy as she'd expected, though she'd always had strong wrists and forearms, and she gave it an experimental swish or two.

And as she extended it out, absently checking the length of it, her other task for today occurred to her.

Her eyes narrowed as she thought about it, but not in any way that reflected thoughts she wished to reject. No – she'd been helpless. She'd been given to despair. She'd been angry without a target. But now she had something to be legitimately angry about, something on which she could direct the full force of her energy.

She had something useful to fill the next few minutes. And by God, she was going to _enjoy_ it.

"Ma'am?" said the young Marine standing outside the room, keeping an admirable calm in the face of his commander-in-chief emerging from the room brandishing a sword.

"Corporal," started Coraline, taking a moment to identify the man's rank, "Do you know where they might have an Eroder set up in this building?"

* * *

><p>They had no Eroder point, so they made one in the same room.<p>

Coraline waited while the air crackled and filled around her, the shadows deepening and hastily-arranged gas light flaring. The door was shut. The team outside did their work.

Finally, the room settled, and she shifted her grip on the sword, leaning it against her left shoulder.

"Ambassador," she said, in a voice that tolerated no disobedience. The air remained still, and Coraline counted to five.

"Ambassador," she repeated, and on the wall opposite her, lines in the shape of a door etched themselves across the paintwork.

She stamped her right foot, and said, for the third and last time, "Ambassador. Come. _Forth_."

The door opened, and the silhouette of the Ambassador picked its way out of the rectangle of light, stark and thin against the brightness, leg-points tapping. She stepped daintily onto the floor, her cup and saucer still present in her hands.

She looked up, saw Coraline and the blade, and the smile on her face stayed there.

One leg reached casually behind her and slammed the door shut, her cup barely swaying, her smile staying where it was.

"Stormcrow," said the Ambassador, her tone light and pleasant. "You summon me. You summon me _while bearing iron_."

"You know why I want to talk to you," replied Coraline.

"Oh?" said the Ambassador, her tone dangerously smooth. "I'm afraid I couldn't possibly…"

"_No_," hissed Coraline, angling the sword forward, ready to be brought down. "No-more-playing. No more 'I couldn't possibly's or 'I cannot say' or any of the charming misdirecting bullshit you love so much. I am not in a good mood. I am this close to becoming just a little bit unstable. And I am going to ask you questions while my god-damned _self-control_ hangs in the balance. _Do not play games with me_."

The Ambassador's smile froze. Then she placed the cup atop the saucer, and flicked them aside, sending them clattering and shattering against the wall to her left. Coraline's gaze flicked there, just long enough for the Ambassador to blur forward, claws extending and lashing through the air. The sword flew out, catching the claws scant inches from Coraline's face with a clash of metal.

For a long moment, they held the position, the Ambassador maintaining a steady pressure but not shifting, while Coraline held against the same pressure, her eye boring into the Ambassador's own buttons. Thin smoke began to trickle upwards from where the Ambassador's claws met the falchion's steel, but if she felt any discomfort, she didn't show it.

Coraline held her ground, and the Ambassador held her own, neither shifting their gaze.

"Then if my serious conduct is what you wish, then you need only have said all along," said the Ambassador, her smile now a flat line, her face shifted to something much more angular and like chrome steel below the surface of her sallow skin. "And if you wish to see how serious I can be, then I shall be too happy to oblige you, and then one of us shall leave this room a _corpse_, Stormcrow."

They held the postion.

And then, slowly, reluctantly, the both pulled apart, Coraline letting the sword's tip fall, the Ambassador stepping back and letting soft curves grow back into her face.

"You know what I want to know," started Coraline.

"Oh, indeed I do," replied the Ambassador, distractedly flicking her hand in the air, calling back the shattered remains of her cup and saucer, the pieces reforming in the air.

"We were attacked by a group called the Tantibalic Tendency last night. They were accompanied b y - or led by – a psychephage."

The Ambassador remained silent.

"What the hell was that psychephage?"

"You had to start with a difficult question, did you not?"

"You expect me to believe you don't know what it was?"

"Oh no, I certainly know. It's explaining it to you that poses a problem." The Ambassador sipped from her reformed cup. "It doesn't have a species name among humans that can act as a shorthand, for it doesn't have a species, not anymore. It took pains to remove any competition."

"Then does it have an individual name?"

"Still a challenge. It's been given so _many_. Apophis? Whiro? Amatsu-Mikaboshi? La Terreur En Marche? Any of these ring a bell, Stormcrow?" Coraline stared.

"Let's … call it by the name that the Rome-men did," said the Ambassador. "Call it by the name given it by its followers now. Call it Tantibus."


	9. Unveiled

Tantibus.

The name meant nothing to Coraline. Some of the others rung faint bells, as mentions in disparate folklores, but meant little. _La Terreur En Marche_ rung sinister to even her haplessly monolingual mind. And if she had to take a wild shot in the dark, none of the many other unknown names would bode anything good.

She thought furiously, assembling what she knew as the Ambassador watched her over the rim of her cup, button-eyes hard and gleaming. Shadows whispered as the Ambassador shifted her weight from needle-leg to needle-leg, the flame of the gas light flickering at some unfelt breeze.

The air had grown cold barbs, and even the Ambassador's nigh-reflexive smile was guarded and frozen, without even the suggestion of sincerity put into it. And if the notion hadn't seemed so unreal, Coraline would have even imagined fear was nestling behind the beldam's gaze.

But was that such an unreal notion? She knew from past experience that beldams could certainly feel fear. The Beldam of the Pink Palace certainly had, both of Coraline's escape from her grasp and of her own monstrous sister. And the countless psychephages that had followed her, beldam or not, had often felt the same emotion as they faced Coraline, faced some mad hunter bearing iron and a deeply-nurtured anger. The emotion of prey facing a predator.

She held the thought.

Agents dragged into the darkness. Hawkwood moaning and crying in Tantibus's grasp, before the soul was sucked out of him by the creature's noose. Fires and chaos across an entire city. Maria choking on blood, and the words she struggled to make.

It had shifted form, from something shapeless in the dark, to something like a spider, to something like a mad dog, to something that had just enough human features to be uncanny while lacking enough to remain monstrous.

Hell's bells, how about every last thing Tantibus had _said_ to her?

Coraline rubbed at her temple with the fingers of one hand.

"It's a fear-eater," she said. "That's how it gets a conduit to a soul. It feeds on our damn fear."

"Indeed," said the Ambassador. "Fear, unease, desperation, horror, shock, mind-killing _terror. _Its spectrum rivals my kin's own desire for size."

"And there's only one of it?" The question's tone all but begged for the answer to be yes.

"When my brood mother's brood mother was but a hatchling, back in pyramid days … no. But only one remains now."

"And it's had access to us for all of that time?"

"Believe that it has. It has fed at its leisure. Fed in great quantities to sustain it for centuries. Fed on individuals for pleasure's sake. And whenever it took what was to another psychephage's target – then it would do so and couldn't be stopped."

"There's not another psychephage that can challenge it? Surely there must be another old coatl or beldam, or maybe a group…"

"It killed _all_ competition, Stormcrow." The Ambassador's voice grew bitter and higher. "Do you imagine humankind is alone in feeling fear? In having _souls?_ It fed on all who resisted it, until those left feared to resist it, and that accommodated it _perfectly_. We withdraw when it rises to hunt, and we ration ourselves as best we may until it sleeps again."

"You hide from it," said Coraline bluntly.

The Ambassador didn't answer, merely gripping her cup and saucer so hard the china almost seemed to squeak in protest. Coraline settled, beginning to compose her next question before the Ambassador spoke again, light and sing-song as if recounting a fairy-tale.

"One fine day – many hundreds of years ago – a trading galleas cut through the waters that led to Italian ports, heavy with Caffan refugees and vermin. And – for this ship was loved by its crew, and so it opened the way freely to _us_ – in the scurrying emptiness of the hold, it was no great effort for Tantibus to reach out, seize but one of the vermin, and weave a dark pestilence into its blood. And but a few years later, Europe's cities turned into charnel-pits, rotting over with the fear born of ignorance and unanswered prayers."

"Wait…" Coraline blinked, non-plussed by what the Ambassador had just casually revealed. "You're not seriously saying that it caused the …"

"It fed on that for many a year, and soon slept again. And we'd dared to hope that it may sleep for good before it awoke again; this time, in China. It whispered rebellion into one man's mind, and fed as Manchu soldiers sacked their way to Beijing and as the empire ate itself in civil war. Feeding on the terror of millions caught up in bloodshed they didn't seek."

"How could it…"

"And after that … well, it drank from the march of your empires, from the overwhelmed weak and enslaved, even as it ensnared from the shadows." The Ambassador considered. "Those were but a few of its actions, and certainly not the last before now. And those are but a few of the horrors it perpetrated against your kind. The kin suffered their share. The Slow Night, the annihilation of the Eurasian kimatine packs, Qucumatz's last stand… shall I tell you _those_ stories, Stormcrow? Or perhaps you'll count yourself content with the moral of all this, which is of _course_ we hide from it, you _fool_. The alternative is _annihilation_. We cannot fight it!"

The Ambassador's voice had heightened, coming to a savage shriek for the last sentences, Coraline taking a cautious step as the creature grew agitated.

Something occurred.

"And when did you start to suspect that it was returning this time?" asked Coraline, her tone very, very carefully controlled.

"A year before was when it became unmistakeable," said the Ambassador. "All the old shadows were stirring, all the old mind-destroying coldness nipping at us again. Even the Grimalkind, arrogant and forgetful and stupid as they are, couldn't help but feel something was amiss, though they had no idea what."

"So when I asked you if a psychephage – any psychephage at all, really – might have been involved in Massachusetts, you lied to me," continued Coraline, her voice cool and smooth. "And when Wybie asked you how a kimatine could be driven mad – through induced fear, as it turns out – you lied to him as well."

"I hardly lied. I merely used half-truths. Directed you and he along other avenues of investigation. Omitted parts of my knowledge. I am an ambassador, after all. I needs must employ my talents."

"Interesting. Tell me, Ambassador, do you know how Tantibus has made its grand entrance this time around?"

"Do tell."

"It made its entrance with the aid of human terrorists – its cultists, probably. They attacked this city last night, targeting civilians. They killed them by the thousands. And it killed one of my oldest friends. And its lackeys attacked other cities, in this country and others, with similar results."

She raised the falchion again, her knuckles white around the hilt.

"We're only now getting a full tally, Ambassador. And you know what? I'd be willing to bet that a pretty good portion of the _hundred thousand_ people who were slaughtered last night would still be alive if you had _TOLD ME EVERYTHING FROM THE BEGINNING!"_

The thin line that passed for the Ambassador's lip curled.

"Spare me your indignation over lives lost, Stormcrow." Her voice was cold and contemptuous. "I raised not a claw to a single one of those souls, and that particular concern ill becomes you, killer of thousands."

"What the _hell_ are you talking …"

"_Must I recount your own life, Stormcrow?" _half-screamed the Ambassador, her self-control falling violently astray. "Shall I tell you more tales? Of the young beldam, mine own sister-daughter, who had not even finished her first hunt before she was hunted down and murdered by a monster wielding the bane. Of the oldest of the coatls, too old and proud and near-senile to know when he should have turned down a human's deal, and who was killed by your hand on the field of your own White House. Of the three siblings, phylaxii, who were outnumbered and alone, but who gave their all to try and save us from _you_. And of the thousands others, dead by your hand or by those you inspired."

Fury all but seemed to blaze off the Ambassador. Coraline kept her gaze level with the Ambassador's own as the beldam's face slowly began to sharpen once more.

"Did you spare a thought for them, Stormcrow? Did you feel regret for what you did as they died by _your_ terror? Or did you feel naught but the bloodlust of the hunt?"

"Oh, I _get_ it," said Coraline, cutting the Ambassador, her voice heavy and vicious with sarcasm. "_I'm_ the monster here. Well, I did have to earn the Stormcrow title somehow. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that every single psychephage I took down had either _killed or was killing children_. And you _dare_ complain when we fight back, when we can finally defend ourselves?"

"We have no choice, you _fool_. We eat the souls of your kind . We feed or we _die_."

"Then it's just as damn well we came up with the synthetic soul-matter, isn't it? Thank the Concord. Without it, don't think I would have stopped for a second. For a single damn second."

The two stared each other down, fury-filled echoes ringing off the walls, the gas light flaring, caught up in the uncanny currents running thick in the room.

Coraline spoke first.

"This is dangerously irrelevant," she said slowly, carefully, icily.

"Not so. Take it, at least, as a motive for my withholding of information."

"And what was that motive?"

"If you are plagued by a monster beyond confrontation," said the Ambassador, as simply and clearly as if she was explaining it to a child, "Then what better deliverance than seeing it clash with another monster?"

* * *

><p>Coraline held her breath, considering her next move as carefully as she could.<p>

She was on the edge of a precipice.

It had been satisfying, so, so satisfying, to openly rage against the Ambassador, to rip open the scars which had never fully healed (even as a part of herself whispered the Ambassador's words back, _killer bloodlust monster Stormcrow_, and shrank fearfully from them) and to lose herself to a part of her anger.

But in this moment, she couldn't afford to. Because in the Ambassador, past the mask all but ripped away, there was mixed desperation and spite. One could yet help her. The other would leave her adrift. And there was something about her last words that invited examination.

Atop something needle-thin and twice as delicate, Coraline ventured.

"Tell me," she said after a long moment's pause, by which time the Ambassador had started to recompose herself, "Are psychephages immortal?"

The Ambassador's composure broke briefly, displaying surprise and bemusement at the query.

"In practice, no. But if we won all confrontation and succeeded in every hunt, then we might yet. Our realm does not suffer some of your evils, natural annihilation among them. Why is this asked?"

Coraline leaned against one wall, resting briefly and shifting the falchion in her hands, holding it with both hands, tip resting on the floor. "Have you ever heard of something called dented iron?"

"I take it that it means nothing so obvious as a battered bane artefact." The Ambassador was irritated, and yet curious.

"It's named after a condition in our football players," said Coraline, her tone now quiet and even. "They take a lot of damage - through pummelling, tackling, strain, all that fun stuff – and it builds up. Scar tissue's a shoddy replacement for the original stuff, and old injuries linger and drag you down. And they die sooner than other people for it. And after a lifetime spent taking knocks, I think I'm in the same boat as them."

She looked right at the Ambassador. "There's only so much our medicine can yet do. I've got two or three decades left, at the most. How much longer will an immortal unchallengeable fear-eater have?"

The words stung, raising the old familiar numbness that had first hit her when she'd spoken to a doctor about a few growing aches several years back. At some point, she knew she'd begin to break down for good, and it was a sour and dark thought. To bring it before the Ambassador rankled. But if she wanted to save her world, what choice did she have?

"Ambassador, if I'm one of your monsters … then please, for god's sake, help me take down the other one now."

The Ambassador's face was infuriatingly and tellingly blank as she carefully sipped from her cup, black button-eyes boring into Coraline.

"When Tantibus attacked yesterday, it took us by surprise," pressed on Coraline. "All we had at hand were a few rounds of ferroshot and basic weapons from which to fire them. And we managed to hurt it. It healed, but we hurt it, and we can kill it, but we _need your help_." The words were sincere. Against such a terrifying unknown as Tantibus, Coraline wanted every scrap of help she could claw together. And the Ambassador's full knowledge would be invaluable.

The Ambassador placed her cup back on the saucer and contemplated the contents for a few moments before she looked back up at Coraline.

"Tantibus does not merely hunt," she said. "It delights in setting examples. If it imagined that the kin had found a reason to not fear it, then it would devote much long and bloody work to giving us a reason once more. We would court decimation should it discover any assistance."

"You've already told what it is what it does, and how you usually react to it," said Coraline. "You don't think that was something I could try and use against it?"

"It was information offered for a cautionary sake, not an assistive one."

"No. It was a little more than that," said Coraline softly. For as the Ambassador spoke, Coraline realised that she was nearer the mark than she had believed.

For she, and the knowledge and tools accumulated by the Department of the Supernatural and all its counterparts worldwide, were the best and only chances the psychephages had for seeing their oldest nemesis destroyed.

The Ambassador knew this. She wanted Coraline to defeat the fear-eater, even as she believed it was impossible, and the conflict tore at her, eroded her cool detachment and coupled with her desperation to lunge like a leaf in the wind when Coraline had brandished the possibility of her winning.

The Ambassador remained composed, all signs of her earlier eruption now vanished as she seemed to give her own thoughts weight. Coraline affected to absently play with the falchion's hilt. Inside, her heart was beating like a jackhammer.

_If she'd screwed up … if she'd misinterpreted things … if Wybie and the Department had no tricks to pull out and Tantibus struck again … damn it, why did the Ambassador pretend at that _silence_ all the ti…_

The Ambassador straightened her back and spoke.

"Even if I felt your …ah, fool's errand deserved more than cursory dismissal, I couldn't answer you," the Ambassador began, "The decision to do so could not rest solely on my shoulders."

Coraline frowned. "I was under the impression you were one of the most powerful and influential beldams in the Sur-real."

"As of ten years ago, after the Toulouse Scouring, _yes_. But I am not more powerful than something I am but a part of. And war in any form against La Terreur En Marche must be considered carefully. By many heads. By _all_, if possible."

The Ambassador, with an illusionist's twist of her hand, slid the cup and saucer into nothingness. Her claw hands clapped briefly, the sound echoing and acquiring an eldritch timbre with each successive echo, and she spoke one word, short and unprounceable.

It would be inaccurate to say that, from Coraline's perspective, the room expanded outwards, space rushing in to fill what had once been a void.

It would be inaccurate to say that countless doors of faint light formed in the walls and ceiling, sliding open in a thousand different ways from a thousand different angles to admit space and other things to the room.

It would be marginally more accurate to say that both of these things happened at the same time, space sliding around itself in such a way as to make Coraline's eyes hurt, setting the walls criss-crossing with lines of white fire that moulded itself into wood and metal, that opened as space collapsed.

The whole thing happened in seconds, and as Coraline turned to regard the room; even past the blur as solidity tried to reassert itself, it didn't take hawk eyes to see that they'd acquired visitors.

Shapes moved in the blurry dark. Humanoid shapes, bestial shapes, winged and centauroid and massively serpentine and utterly alien shapes rose around her, moving forwards.

Eyes stared down at her, orbs of fire and pinpricks of light and pits of ice and obsidian, buttons and coins and nothingness and ink and clock faces, in pairs and singly and in numbers beyond counting.

Her merely human senses tried to register just how much more Sur-real the room had gotten, and gave up.

Coraline, irrational as she knew it was, found herself truly wishing for something a little more substantial than a sword.

"Kin," said the Ambassador, her clear voice casting itself over the low litany of rustling and hissing and murmuring surrounding them on all sides. "The Stormcrow has a proposition for us."


	10. Ambition

The silence that emerged from the unseen audience was palpable. The atmosphere among what Coraline assumed to be representatives from the psychephages was guarded, hostile, and somehow frightened in spite of their numbers. Eyes blinked coldly, forms shifted and edged backwards.

Finally the first stepped forward, loping purposely over the concrete floor. It was a horla, a despair-eater, with a long lupine face set with hollow blackness in place of eyes and sparse black fur stretched over a tall and skeletal frame. Around its throat hung a torc of dark and twisted wood, attached to which was a small dark mirror which Coraline carefully averted her gaze from.

"Rot her proposition," said the horla in a voice as cold and empty as the wind over a grave. "And rot her. Send her from here."

"_Hospitality_, honoured kin. And prudence. What she wishes to offer us could shatter the Old Terror. I say the company hears her out." The Ambassador's smile at that moment; courteous, patient, at ease amongst the sea of fear and aggression on all sides, was as diplomatic as anything Coraline had seen from her at close hand. But it wasn't enough for some.

"I say she _dies__,_" growled a new figure. This one was an anger-eater, a wendigo, with mad pale eyes stark against an ochre-red skull-face, the muscles in its sinewy body tensed as it slowly prowled forward, raising barks of agreement from others and drawing the attention of Coraline and the Ambassador. "I say we slay the enemy that has offered itself to us like a fool."

"_I_ say _peace_, for the meanwhile," said the Ambassador, soft menace in her voice as she set herself between Coraline and the wendigo. "This is _my _called court, and _my_ domain. We will hear her out."

"Shall we?" hissed the wendigo. "Domains have been fought over, for matters far less serious than this. The Stormcrow will…"

"…Be heard," came a new and deeper voice from the back of the mass of psychephages, hushing the quell of support for the wendigo that had sprung up and silencing the creature mid-sentence. "Let us hear what she has planned for Tantibus."

The hubbub hushed, but though the wendigo had been surprised by the sudden intervention, it remained where it was, facing down the Ambassador. Pale eyes met button eyes, and the Ambassador slowly dropped her claw-hands to her sides, where they hung ready and open.

"My domain," she said softly. "My ruling. I would not advise pressing this."

The wendigo hissed in response.

Nothing happened for several moments, in whatever silent battle of wills was taking place, and Coraline, despite the possible risk to her life that lay in it, found herself distracted from the contest by the mass of psychephages around her.

They were, in all fairness, very easy to get distracted by. Dozens, if not hundreds, of different creatures and forms were taking shape, with at least one representative from every species Coraline had encountered and some from a few she hadn't.

There, directly in front of her, was a todal; an eater of caution, a creature seemingly made from rough wooden sticks arranged into a skeletal shape, with two clock faces ticking in place of eyes above a thin slit of mouth (containing, as a scar on Coraline's left shoulder blade could attest, rows of razor-bladed teeth.) The todal was in turned perched beside the hulking mechanical form of a defiance-eater; a myrmidon, plated over with thick bronze metal, steam hissing from its articulated limbs, with emptiness watching Coraline from within the eye holes of a Corinthian helmet.

Beside them was a very humanoid and disarmingly attractive ragamoll, a lust-eater, garbed in a tight silvery-white dress suit, black ringlets framing an appealing, androgynous face. What inhuman features it possessed; its cat-slitted eyes and faintly shimmering skin, wouldn't be evident until its victim was at close quarters, at which point the unfortunate soul would usually be past the point of being able to act on them. It watched Coraline with dark eyes, glinting past the tilted brim of a white fedora. Behind it rose the utterly contrasting figure of a disgust-eating nuckelavee. It was centauroid and horrific. A man's torso rose from a horse's back, both skinless and bloody, pus-slicked veins pulsing through its flesh, with both human and horse heads staring at Coraline balefully with single huge eyes. Its deformed claws seemed to elongate and sharpen with anticipation as it turned to watch the contest.

Around it, and continuing on, countless more. The glowing wisp-image of a hotchi, a hope-eater. Seelie and unseelie, love- and hate-eaters, aloft on gossamer wings to gain a vantage point over the scene. A pride-eating marid, smoke veiling and uncurling around a body that wasn't quite human, next to a greed-eating djinn, its coin-eyes gleaming with cold calculation.

Coraline's gaze swept around, and caught that of the creature that rose from the room's back, a colossal rising serpent, covered by bands of black and red and gold feathers. It noticed her look, and returned it evenly with eyes like miniature suns.

_Stormcrow_, came a voice that rung in her mind suddenly; the same voice, she realised, that had spoken in favour of hearing her earlier. _This gathering's outcome shall be twisted towards thine survival, if such is within mine power._

_Why?, _she thought back.

_Because I too despise the Old Terror, that which called itself Tlaloc amongst my first hunts. Because I wish it to be destroyed. And because – _Here the voice rose and deepened,_ - Because I am Kukulcan, honoured descendent of great Tohil, whom thou slew over the White Palace. For once this affair is over, thine blood is _mine _to claim, and none other's._

It was nice, thought Coraline, to find friends where you could get them. Even if they wanted to kill you.

The sudden sound of a scuffle and a swift organic noise, followed by a surprised grunt, quickly drew Coraline's attention back to the Ambassador and the wendigo, where she was too late to see the action but had a prime view of its outcome.

The wendigo had retreated several paces, leaving a flurry of gouged claw-marks in the floor, swaying slightly and raising one hand in a gesture of surrender as it wheezed faintly. A heavy black hilt protruded from its chest, with an pitch-stained knife-blade coming clean out the creature's back. The Ambassador stood at ease, watching the wendigo like a hawk, a matching knife held in her right hand. It was a kukri, a heavy knife with a curving white blade and chitin-black hilt and pommel. The Ambassador twirled it casually, still watching the wendigo, her smile expectant.

The wendigo acquiesced, reluctantly pulling the embedded kukri free with a hiss of pain and tossing it with a clatter to the floor by the Ambassador's feet. The Ambassador continued to watch the wendigo, and the creature, with yet more reluctance, slowly knelt, touching its head to the ground.

Satisfied, the Ambassador picked up the kukri with her free hand and vanished both knives with a deft twirl, plucking her teacup and saucer back out of the air in the same movement as well. She turned back to Coraline, taking a sip as she did so.

"Well," she started, "Now that that unpleasantness has been resolved, would you care to present your proposition to the Court, Stormcrow?"

* * *

><p>"Mr Lovat, physics doesn't <em>work<em> that way."

It was what Wybie had expected from Vladimir Vasili, the old and experienced head of the Institute for Advanced Nuclear Research, from the moment the man had arrived in his office and had Wybie's idea explained to him.

He wasn't alone with Wybie. Another from the Institute was there as well, as well as Vasili's assistant and two scientific advisers from the Defence Department, both of whom were talking in quick and hushed tones to one another.

"Doesn't it?" said Wybie. "The underlying principles are sound enough."

"The underlying principles are just fine. It's where you've taken them and how you propose to put them into practise that makes the whole thing fall flat."

"It's basically … look, you know about nuclear fission?"

Vasili gave Wybie a look as flat as a plateau. "No, Mr Lovat. I'm only the twenty-years-and-serving head of the Institute for Advanced Nuclear Research. I've never heard of nuclear fission. _That's complete news to me_."

"When you split an atom's nucleus, you get fragments with smaller proton counts. You produce lighter elements in addition to no small amount of energy," said Wybie over a despairing mutter from Vasili. "What I propose is taking a given sample of an isotope of one of the synthetic elements from the fusion plants – phlebotinium, say – exciting it with neutron bombardment, and using that as the core in an explosive device."

"I'm not denying any part of that. And I'll even be so reckless as to say that a suitable isotope could be found. What will likely be beyond our capabilities, however, will be making every product element ferrous."

"Not necessarily," said the assistant quietly, almost shyly. They glanced at Vasili, but the old scientist, although surprised at the interjection, was fair-minded enough to let them have their say. "I mean, isn't there precedent in the Cleveland-Holly device, for oxygen production?"

"A fair point," allowed Vasili. "But I know the team behind that, and they were working with established theory and with non-synthetic, non-disputed elements. Nor did their process rely on a single supercritical mass."

"But there is precedent for directed production," said Wybie.

"Not, I fear, in a way that would prove itself applicable to us. Especially for the time scale I would imagine the First Gentleman would require it for..." Vasili looked at Wybie over the top of his glasses. "Am I right in assuming such a device would be needed for the Sur-real situation at hand?"

"A right assumption. I don't think our current ferro-weaponry can cut it. Something like this, however, could cut it and then some."

Vasili bit his lip. The two advisers and the other scientist looked thoughtful, with neither particularly optimistic or pessimistic expressions, but merely those that indicated brains working at full throttle beneath the surface.

"The problem will be time," said Vasili. "A study like this, with only the barest background to work upon, will require..."

"All the effort humanly possible," said Wybie. "Once the President has been informed of the hypothesis and possible production of the device, she'll see to it that every possible resource is thrust in your direction. _Our_ direction. I'm at your disposal as well. I already jotted down some possible blueprints on this piece of paper – son of a something-or-other, it was here by my hand..."

The men and women in the Thaddeus Complex's office spoke at length and with meaning, scribbling ideas, bouncing past papers and studies at each other, debating and scrutinising, placing strategic phonecalls to their own departments and poring over the possibilities.

It was as thorough a way as any of answering Wybie's original question, which was "How could we make an iron nuclear bomb? Assuming that's possible?"

* * *

><p>Coraline found her voice and spoke.<p>

She tried not to exaggerate the issue, nor did she try to be too haughty, nor come hat in hand. She simply tried to talk about their common enemy. She spoke about an alliance, repeating what she had said to the Ambassador. She drew upon every trick for clear and precise speaking she'd had to learn as President.

Alien eyes watched her at every word. The whispers and hisses and barks that had indicated overall mood had gone, leaving a stark and judging silence. The cold in the room grew oppressive, stifling, but Coraline pressed on, praying each and every second that her plea wasn't falling on totally hostile and deaf ears.

She finished and let the silence broil with calculation.

For pity's sake, she thought, the psychephages had to see the point she was trying to make, didn't they? That uniting with her, pooling their resources, taking Tantibus down, was the most important consideration?

Or did the reputation of the Stormcrow, justified or not, run too deep? That, for the psychephages, the least costly solution for them would be to let old and new terrors clash and continue to live with whoever was left?

Either way, she was still mindful that she was alone amongst hundreds of creatures who feared or hated her guts. And she only had an inadequate steel sword. And she was blind on her right side. And that the case she'd presented to them partly relied on her eventual death in any event. And that the whole thing revolved around stopping an ancient and all-powerful world haunting terror-eater before it had accomplished … well, whatever the hell it was trying to do. Feed, in a massively unsubtle and brutal manner presumably.

She took a brief moment to ponder where exactly her life had taken that side-turn into Beyond Screwed Up before the Ambassador spoke.

"You have heard her," she started. "And you know I would not have brought you here had I not believed what she had to say was of value. But now … she is the Court's. Who would dispute her? Who would challenge her?"

The massed Court ranks shifted and murmured. The wendigo looked up, pale eyes bright.

"We have lived with the Old Terror for so long, that it harms us no more," it said. "I say we slay this new terror while it is present for the slaying."

"The Old Terror harms us, fool," came a low voice, and wendigo and Coraline turned to see a hulking kimatine by the room's side, looking at them both with lightning-eyes made thin and tremulous with age. "It took an entire pack of my kin a few days ago when it secured human weaponry for its human followers, and toyed with them, and delighted in breaking them past any returnable point."

+_It harms us in greater ways,_+ came another voice, that didn't so much as make use of sound waves as just bluntly insert itself in deafening tones right into the skulls of the assembled. Coraline, wincing, turned to see a phylax, a faith-eater.

The phylaxii in all their many forms had inspired or mimicked many gods and demons and angels for humanity. Coraline had no idea what this particular one could have possibly inspired, or have mimicked beyond a particularly potent drug-mare. Beryl-green wheels turned within other wheels, intersecting at entirely random angles and spinning unimpeded, with each wheel rimmed with lines of unblinking eyes and sprouting white feathered wings, with, by way of an afterthought, the entire creature being wreathed in fire.

+_It twists our thoughts and will,_+ the phylax continued, +_It wrapped our very wills in chains, so that to court rebellion against it seems alien to our thoughts. It fetters our freedom with its very existence while it demands fear, holding the threat of slaughter to cow us, to make us submit to a lash for all of our existence until we become deluded into thinking that the lash is inevitable and right. So we were taught. So it harms us beyond wanton killing._+

"A lash greater than this one's Concord?" demanded the horla, its mirror gleaming as it rose its head to glance at Coraline.

+_The Stormcrow's Concord is at the point of a gun. Tantibus's terror wraps chains around our very souls. Which is worse?_+

And though there were shouts and sinuous whispers and cants in support of her death, Coraline heard, there were also voices in support of the phylax's words, giving new wings to her hope.

"That terror comes from power unassailable," said the clock-eyed todal, in a voice like wind through a dusk forest. "We may not fight Tantibus. That is the point of its power. But the Stormcrow, however … I see no reason why we should suffer her as well if she will die like any other human. I see no reason why she should not die now."

"Then make her die now," came Kukulcan's deeply amused tones. "Advance and do the deed."

The todal turned to Coraline, who instinctively raised her blade, wondering what the _hell_ the coatl was doing...

The todal saw the Stormcrow, saw the steel, and all but tripped over backwards.

Coraline blinked, while Kukulcan laughed.

"Well?" it said. "Thou speakst of slaying her. 'Tis mine doubt that she'll acquiesce. Who shall step forward to try conclusions?"

Discontented, angry mutters sounded from the Court, none of which actually countered the coatl's word. The wendigo looked up, but saw the same sight as the todal, and whatever fury it possessed was not enough to compel it to face Coraline's sword. Coraline realised that her new allies were rallying around her, realising her argument and giving their voices to its support.

Hell's bells, did she actually now have a chance to come out of this meeting ahead, let alone alive? She held her heart in her mouth, and prayed to whatever that she did so.

And what _was_ she to them that that last point had actually worked? Her mere reputation had struck with enough fear to rob away the desire for a confrontation.

Much like Tantibus was doing to them.

She couldn't afford to have that thought. Not here, not now. Probably not later either, if she could manage it.

"Some of what our honoured kin says is true, though," said the Ambassador to Coraline. "We have never yet mustered the strength to meet Tantibus in open battle – and make no mistake, open battle amidst darkness and chaos is what it will come to. Even married to whatever strength humanity can muster, we cannot be sure of victory."

"And there is another problem."

"What if we win? Will you suffer to release us from the Concord? Then we cannot guarantee that humanity will not be fed upon. And if you do not, we will still be held in shackles, still forced to accept what rations of synthesised soul-matter you grant us for our existence."

"But you'll be free from Tantibus, and whatever it can do to you. You'll be free from its terror," said Coraline.

"To be replaced with your own, which will last even after you are gone and which will place no smaller shackles upon us. Your Concord demands that we live under humanity's sufferance, to be made subject and dependent or else dead by the bane." The Ambassador's gaze sharpened. "Why should we ally with you? Why are you to be held preferable?"

"Then … what do you want?"

"A better state of existence than that which we currently possess." The Ambassador sipped at her cup. "You need merely decide how you may grant it, and whether you wish to."

Coraline ground her teeth together. She had been within grabbing distance of gaining allies among the Court, she had been sure, and then the Ambassador, whom she had taken to be on her side in this, had blind-sided her with _this_.

It had been wrong to think so, of course, she reluctantly acknowledged. The Ambassador wasn't on her side. The Ambassador was on the side of the psychephages, and whether she shared her goals with Coraline was entirely in the air.

"This is something I need to think about," said Coraline at length. "I can't make this decision now. I'll meet with my advisers and agents, check what they know. I'll find out what we can use to fight Tantibus. And then I _will_ get back to you."

"Decide soon," said the Ambassador. "Decide well."

The Court hissed, shifted, began to move or protest as they sensed that the Stormcrow was walking away. The wendigo looked away in frustration, and Kukulcan hissed in satisfaction.

+_One piece of advice for you, in good faith,_+ came the suddenly subdued voice of the phylax for Coraline alone, just as she was about to leave through the door. +_There is one thing that holds true for all of the kin, whatever form and nature we take._+

+_We can move throughout the Sur-real, and we can settle in different locations from which to hunt, and we can co-habit with others. But for each of us, there will be a lair that we hold close to us. A lair of home, of spirit that we hold close to us and will defend at all costs._+

+_And one of the kin like Tantibus, who warps minds so readily and easily, will, I imagine, find its mortal followers drawn close around its lair's entrance in your reality._+

+_Where your servants find its followers in their greatest power, there it will be also._+

Coraline paused with her hand on the door's handle, and then twisted it open and left.

* * *

><p>"Wybie, I've just … who's the company? Ah, hello, Doctor Vasili. And that's … Wybie, you've got <em>that<em> smile again. What happened? What are you planning?"

"Something _brilliant_," replied Wybie, lurching from full inspired-creation-mode, looking up from a sheet of terrifying equations and a table of gleaming metal parts. Behind him, people in lab coats bore other parts and other papers and containers of lead. "You'll love it. Really. But, ah, tell me about your day first."


	11. Harbinger

"Just to set your mind at ease," said Coraline, after a short pause which had followed Wybie's explanation for the equations and lead containers, during which Wybie's expectant expression had started the slow drift towards 'pensive', "This isn't my 'How do I hit my darling husband hard enough to make all the crazy fall out' sort of silence."

"That's a relief," said Wybie. "I don't like that silence."

"This is my 'My darling husband might be onto something good, and how do I use this and get help from the psychephage Court at the same time' silence."

"Which you so rarely get a chance to use." Wybie drummed his hands on his legs, perched on one of the uncomfortable metal chairs that littered his workspace. "And … ah, what are you thinking about the Court?"

"They're allies … but only if I annul the Concord. Or amend it so that it's _useless_."

"And that's not a price you want to pay."

"I don't. And …"

She left the sentence hanging there for a brief moment, while she marshalled her thoughts, beating them into something coherent out of the various nagging questions and doubts that had occurred to her since she'd left the Court, since her anger and fear and desperation had had time to settle and simmer down to something that didn't rule her.

How badly did she need the Court?

Could they take on Tantibus already with what they knew?

Was it possible … or even probable, that Tantibus's very nature was making her panic and overestimate its threat?

From what she'd experienced at close-quarters and heard and inferred, there was no doubt that the fear-eater was a monstrously powerful psychephage; a swift shapeshifter, unnaturally strong, cunning, capable of enduring massive injury, and running on the power of what had to be hundreds or thousands, if not millions, of souls hunted down the millennia.

But it _was_ hurt by iron, like any other psychephage. It had bled white fire, and had struck out in pain. It wasn't some dark unknowable. It ran by laws the Department of the Supernatural had spent decades researching. If they would face any problem, it would be in mustering the sheer firepower to engage it. And lo and behold, Wybie was producing something she could only think of as a _ferrobomb_, and if that wouldn't be enough firepower, then nothing could.

The phylax in the Court had even given her the information (assuming it was trustworthy) that would help them pin it down and force a confrontation. It would just be a matter of finding the greatest concentration of the Tantibalics, wherever they may be.

They could very well win with what they already had, and the Concord needn't be annulled.

They _could_.

But _could_ was a treacherous word, that would inspire false hope and infer conclusions that didn't have much of a chance of occurring.

A hundred thousand deaths, ten thousand of them on her own doorstep. The destruction of half of Capitol Hill. Smoke staining the air black. Bodies piled in blood-slick streets. All born of one night.

She couldn't take that risk. Not for another night. Not for what Tantibus and its lackeys would gleefully do again. Because if she did, then there would only be more bodies, and it would be her fault for not grabbing every weapon she could, no matter the cost.

What about the Concord?, said another part of her. Take it away, take away the fear of retaliation from the psychephages, and you'll undo everything you ever worked for. Children will die in the cold and dark, hunted by monsters. Think back to the Beldam. Think back to the ghost-children. Would you wish that on another child, one without your luck? Because then _they'll_ be your fault.

She pulled herself away, and tried to evaluate her options and outcomes rationally. Trying to trick the Court wouldn't work; any deception-eating horkos would be able to pick up on the lie immediately. So what did that leave her with?

One: she kept the Concord, and with good luck, they'd destroy Tantibus before anyone else had to die. Assuming incredible luck, and that everything they knew was true, and that the Tantibalic Tendency didn't have some game-breaking cards left to play.

Two: she kept the Concord, and they'd have no such improbable good fortune, and thousands more would die.

Three: she dropped the Concord, and, assuming that the psychephages would spell the difference between victory and defeat, they'd destroy Tantibus, and then the psychephages would hunt as they always had, and the piles of bodies would simply be shifted to the shadows…

Four: she thought of something new and brilliant. Tantibus would die as quickly and horribly as possible, everyone would live in harmony happily ever after, and nobody else would die.

It wasn't an inspiring selection.

She badly missed Maria. She'd be able to evaluate the mess, infer things Coraline couldn't, and maybe stumble across some out-the-box solution.

"…And I don't know," she confessed to Wybie. "I don't see any options that won't demand a sacrifice I'm ready to make. There's no easy out."

Wybie bit at his lip. "I don't know … I don't want everything we fought for to be thrown away because of one emergency … but if there ever was an emergency that demanded it, this would be the one." He sighed and rubbed at his beard. "I don't think the Court could be trusted to help. They could just get your promise, promise help in return, and then leave us hanging. Or stab us in the back at the worst possible moment."

"I know that could happen, but … I don't think it's as likely as you think. The vibe I got from them was that I _was_ their best chance for actually killing Tantibus. All they were disagreeing on was whether betting on me was worth the risk." As she said the words, Coraline didn't bother hiding the uncertainty in her voice. For all she knew, the Ambassador was tricking her again, and had roped all the rest of the Court into the deception.

But that was unlikely. If the ultimate goal of the psychephages was to see her dead, then she would have died in that chamber.

Whatever the situation, all she knew was that she should follow her own advice from earlier.

"Damn this, damn the Court, damn everything. I'm going to be the President and leave this for now. I'll learn more about what's going on, I'll see what picture the CIA and others have built up of the Tantibalics and Tantibus. I'll make the decision on the Court once I know what I'm dealing with." She looked straight at Wybie. "Do you have everything you need to make the ferrobomb?"

"The what? The … Ooh, I like that name, and I'll steal it with your permission. And not here, no." He scratched the back of his head. "We need to transfer to Nevada, to facilities there that'll have the supplies we need. We've made contact with them. We're ready to go ahead with this … If you think it'll be worth it."

He was reluctant to say it now that the moment had come, it was apparent. He didn't relish leaving Coraline's side in the midst of this affair. And Coraline would be lying if she said she didn't want him to stay either. But if their choice was their own happiness versus placing one more arrow in their quiver against Tantibus, then that was no choice at all.

"Let everyone else involved know that the President approves, that she'll see that they get whatever they need, and that if she has to readjust the budget to cover the costs of all the overtime they spend on this, then she won't be complaining in the _slightest_. And you…" She faltered, briefly. "You keep yourself safe while you work. You'll bring ferroshot?"

"And clean underwear and sunscreen and I won't talk to any strange men and … ow! It was a _joke_. A nice, simple, levity-inducing _joke_." His put-upon pained indignation faded as he rubbed his shoulder. "Of course. And you'll do the same?" His voice betrayed real fear. He knew the risks she'd risk by staying here in Washington (risks which, on account of the human condition, he hadn't considered as applying to himself while in the city).

She answered by pulling him towards her, and slightly downwards as he stooped, and kissed him.

It went on for several long moments, carrying all the meaning they wished to put into it.

"Seriously, stay safe," said Coraline, after it had broken off. "Get yourself killed, and I'll have you reanimated just so I can do it myself. Properly."

"I love you too."

* * *

><p>Through the iron-grey sky, a jet cut a blue-white trail.<p>

It, along with six others in the next few hours, three of which were decoys, would, through different and eclectic routes, deliver whoever was involved in the ferrobomb project to Nevada before the day was out.

Wybie was aboard the first one, but Coraline didn't watch it leave. She had other things to keep her busy.

Reports of more sporadic attacks had begun to filter in from the country and the rest of the world, aftershocks after the first savage wave. They were small, inasmuch as anything with a casualty count numbering in the dozens could be called 'small', but enough to keep people afraid, the military on high alert, and services nationwide tied up. Coraline had to stay afloat in those reports, to make sure that National Guard commanders were kept alert and ready, and to continue broadcasting constant reassurances, commiserations, and promises of retaliation that grew stale on her tongue after the fourth or fifth telling.

All diplomatic visits had been indefinitely put on hold. The supply network that connected Earth to Luna and Mars had been suspended after a series of strikes at the main spaceport, but communiques from the various governors of America's and other countries colonies had contained assurances that they had years' worth of stockpiles, and that they could hold out.

At least half of the world's nations had escalated their terror threat levels as high as they could go, and had coupled that with a massive outpouring of energy from their intelligence services. Several rooms away from Coraline's makeshift office, the heads of the CIA, Club de Berne, and Brazilian Intelligence Agency were updating their shared pool of suspects, possible locations, details both concrete and dubious. Every half-hour, another report would find itself on Coraline's desk regarding their progress.

Her own meeting came well into the evening, via an en-masse televised call with the heads of state of every member of the United Nations, forced to the makeshift call by the necessity of speed and the not-unincidental gutting of the United Nations Headquarters during the attacks on New York. Each leader convened, discussed, and passed a resolution that officially declared the Tantibalic Tendency an enemy of every nation, all within the space of half an hour, and all the while with every one of their colleagues flickering before them in a great compound image of hundreds of faces.

It wasn't the first time in the history of the organisation where it had stood totally united. But such times were infrequent enough that they deserved recognition nonetheless.

Sleep was merely a pleasant memory for Coraline by the time the call and her report of its contents to Congress had finished, and her coffee-frayed nerves were on edge by the time the clocks turned towards the evening.

It was only with supreme effort that she managed to not open fire on Mr Moloney when he knocked and entered, a tense and nervous look on his face.

"What is it?" asked Coraline, her voice sharp as she raised her head from where she leaned on her desk, papers and tablets fanned before her.

"It's the FBI, ma'am." Moloney's bloodshot eyes and tangled hair betrayed his own exhaustion, which he kept concealed as well as he could beneath a brisk and controlled demeanour. "They were combing through Ground Zero for the attacks in Washington. And they found an alive Tantibalic."

"They what?" Speeches and psychephages and resolutions and ferrobombs were dismissed for the moment. Coraline grabbed for her coat and focused on Moloney like a hawk, while part of her mind started picking at the implications of the discovery. "How?"

"He surrendered to them. Just walked out of the rubble and handed himself over to them. He's being interrogated in a few minutes. The Director wants your presence at the remote viewing."

* * *

><p>"State your name."<p>

The voice was semi-mechanical, modified and given a cold and intimidating timbre from the speakers it passed through. The agent conducting the interrogation did so from another room, and he in turn was watched from a closed-off viewing chamber in which Coraline, assorted Directors, and military staff and cabinet secretaries watched and waited.

The agent's voicepiece was at one end of a reinforced and wire-hardened interrogation cell, enclosed by four pale and sterile walls, holding only a table, a restraining chair, and the Tantibalic prisoner.

"I don't have a name," said the prisoner mildly in an accent not quite placeable, a fresh-faced and pleasant looking young man, stripped of his armour and wearing dull orange prisoner fatigues. "Not since I became part of the Tendency."

"State the name you had before you joined the Tantibalic Tendency."

"I don't know. When you join, it takes memories from you. It reaches inside and … takes things. It tears them away and leaves only a few things that it needs. It does the same to everyone. It shows us the truth."

There was a shiver amongst the onlookers. The Tantibalics' eyes were an unfocused pale blue, and they stared at the cuboid voicepiece with a detached regard.

"By 'it', what do you refer to?"

"To Tantibus. The one we serve. The psychephage who attacked Washington yesterday, along with my brothers and sisters."

"From where were you recruited by the Tantibalic Tendency?"

"I cannot remember." He considered briefly. "I held a weapon and was given orders for a time. I may have been a soldier, but that is not certain. Nor can I remember why they chose me."

"What was your role within the Tantibalic Tendency?"

"The same as any other. To feed Tantibus. I operated a motorgun at Sabirabad when the populace were in the middle of a festal parade, along with several others from the Tendency. I planted a bomb on the airship carrying a school group from Cape Town to the Bushveld Reserve. I left our cards in the site of an attack by the Fourth Reich Remnant in Kaliningrad, so that the Tendency would take the credit. I was among the task force chosen for Washington."

"Why?" came the growl from the interrogating voicepiece.

"I don't understand the question," said the Tantibalic.

"Why are you and the rest of the Tantibalic Tendency acting to feed Tantibus?"

"Because if we do, the end will come all the more swiftly and gently."

"Clarify."

The man shifted in his restraints. "The world is growing brighter. We are learning more, and with our knowledge, we take away our fear. We don't fear the darkness anymore. We know how to deal with our old terrors. Disease, famine, even, in time, each other."

A note of something beyond cool detachment entered his voice. "And if we lose our fear, then what world would that leave for Tantibus? It knew what we were achieving, and it knew what it had to do."

Emotion edged onto his face, and he raised his head, revealing eyes wide with fervour and white with horror. "It will tear the world apart. It brought together the Tantibalic Tendency, claiming us one by one, uniting our resources and skills. And it will use us and its own power to turn humankinds own weapons upon itself, to sow fear and discord. It will burn everything and leave cold ashes behind it. It will reach for every source of light and snuff it out until all we see and remember is the darkness! It will see us turn on each other amidst its terror!" His voice had risen to a shout, and tears ran unheeded down his cheeks.

His head bowed again, and a single sob racked his frame before he collected himself.

"It will hunt across the remains of this shattered world forever," he whispered. "And we … we cannot … All we can do is help it, so the end will come as painlessly as possible. So that we might keep something left of old humanity, even as it rules once more."

Silence from the interrogator. Then, "Why are you being so forthcoming? Why are you telling us all of this?"

"Because it left me behind," said the Tantibalic. "Because it told me to."

* * *

><p>"I don't understand," said the new Director of the FBI, frustration clear in her expression. "Why deliberately leave an agent behind to reveal your motives and goals. And even if it was intended to mislead us, what could it have intended us to do?"<p>

The Director, Bernstein, Secretary of Defence and Coraline were gathered in Coraline's office, arranged around the metal desk at the room's centre. Clocks ticked and monitors flickered on the grey walls around them. Coraline's arms were folded on the desk in front of her, brooding over the prisoner's words.

"It might be trying to set up a situation where it could bring us to a negotiating table," Bernstein suggested. "Work what more terror it can, and then send us a message to the effect of 'Hey, that was a fun war, but let's not take it all the way, let's just agree to send me a couple of hundred human sacrifices per annum, your choosing, and we'll say no more about it'."

"It knows we'd refuse that offer," objected the Secretary of Defence.

"We don't know that we'd refuse that. We don't know what it might be able to do to get us to the point where we'd consider that a good deal."

"Maybe it's trying to send us down a tangent. To get us to waste our efforts on preparing for all-out war, but to just go for funds, or some sort of coup," said the Director.

"Not likely," said Coraline quietly, drawing all attention to her. "Tantibus is clearly calling the shots, and it wouldn't value our funds in the slightest. And it wouldn't gain anything from a coup that it couldn't have gotten through other, simpler means."

She unfolded her arms and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Let's think about what it wants. It wants to feed. It wants a situation where it can feed on human fear and souls as much as it likes. And strange as it seems, I think it wasn't concealing anything from us with that prisoner. It wants us to know we're fighting a war of annihilation."

"Why? How would that serve it?" asked Bernstein.

"Because it believes it can win," replied Coraline. "And it knows that we'll throw all the effort we humanly can into stopping it, and it believes that we can do nothing to stop it. And the more we fail, the more we'll panic. The more we panic, the more effort we'll expend, and the more we'll begin to jump at any shadow, no matter how much it damages us to do so. And if we begin to fight amongst ourselves over how to take it down properly after another failed attempt, all the better for it. We'll just have more to fight, and more to fear, and we'll fall all the faster."

The other three looked more than a little scared by the notion, and Coraline decided not to inadvertently do Tantibus's job for it.

"But we're _not _going to fall, or fail in killing it," she said, injecting anger and confidence into her voice. "We know we can hurt it. The ferrobomb project will give us something it couldn't have expected or prepared for. And we _will_ be careful. We won't give into desperation or panic and play to its tune."

"We're already sitting in a good position," said Bernstein, his face relighting with a little more shared confidence. "The UN resolution ensured that the security for all the old stockpiles is to be tripled, incorporating personnel failsafes to minimise any damage one or even a few people could do. If it was planning to seize anything from those, it'll find itself frustrated."

"And we're not going to divide ourselves any time soon," added the Secretary. "Every nation in the world's sworn to hunt down the Tendency. Unless they've got any allies or proxies they can call upon, they're _isolated_."

"And we're approaching reasonable estimations of their strength," said the Director. "We don't think they could have any more than a couple of thou…"

Something flashed.

A television screen turned to some major news channel, resting on a table behind the Secretary, had suddenly flared with static, drawing the room's attention, while its quiet speakers began filling the room with a low humming.

"What's…" started Coraline, before the static resolved itself into a motionless sepia image, at the bottom of which was inscribed in elegant lettering – _Public Service Announcement_.

Below a large and stylised _**TT**_.

The humming stopped, and words too soft to discerned began emitting from the speakers.

"Turn it up," hissed Coraline, motioning at the Secretary, who was closest to the television. "This had better not…"

"…I repeat, this is the message to the people of the United States from the Tantibalic Tendency," came the deep, sonorous voice from the television. Coraline all but jumped out her skin when she heard and recognised it.

Tantibus.

What the _hell_ was … _How_ the hell could they even …

"This prerecorded message has been placed into one of your greatest communication channels. This message is also making itself known to other nations in other languages. Rest assured that in knowing its contents, you stand with all other peoples."

"You doubtless know or have experienced the attacks made on many great cities during the night preceding. And you doubtless want answers, explanations, or, failing those, vengeance."

"I understand your horror and distress. Understand it all too well. And trust me when I say that I would have done anything before being forced to those actions. But forced I was, and now I must see these matters to their conclusion, in the same way I have yet taken. Unless I receive help from others."

"Listen now. Your government, those you call your leaders, those who promise safety, and those who promise a better day, have failed you. They invite insurrection and death upon their own people. They co-operate and kowtow to demons that feast on humankind's souls. They are corrupt, worthless, enemies that I share with you."

"Rise up. Overthrow them with the only thing they will respect – fire and blood. Execute those that would call themselves your betters, more knowledgeable, more insightful, for they would do the same to you. Come to my banner, and I shall help and reward you and your kin, and never have to raise a finger to another innocent."

"Purge yourselves of those you mistrust, and rightfully so – and help me build a better world."

The note of melodious and vicious satisfaction that had entered its voice in the last sentence made Coraline's skin crawl, made her despise it all the more. The message stopped there, cutting back to a confused newsreader – but then immediately cut back to the static before the sepia image with a lurch of screeching humming.

Bernstein breathed out.

"Surely they can't imagine that that message will incite any real reaction-" started the Director, before Coraline spoke, her voice carefully level.

"Send whoever's free to check whatever sending stations for the channel might be compromised," she ordered the Secretary. "I trust the American people to remain united now. Nobody outside the truly desperate will act on that. It was a lie. Another piece of twisted manipulation." She knew that in her gut, that _this_, at least, was something made to try and divide humanity. But she knew the psychephage had underestimated humankind.

_For the moment_, hissed her inner cynic. _Fail once now against Tantibus, and die at the hands of whoever gets that first lucky shot._

She sat back in her chair, and while the message repeated and calls started coming in and she went through whatever answers her mind could bring to bear, she desperately wished for a single moment's rest.


	12. Light

On the first day, the whole world reacted to the message from the Tantibalic Tendency.

And the reaction, averaged out across the whole, was 'Go screw yourself'.

Even in areas that had been the worst affected, that had been torched and decimated with all the fury the Tendency could bring to bear, the overwhelming response was one of stark refusal.

Call it defiance, call it a found unity amidst calamity, call it sheer bloody-mindedness; whatever it was, it worked for Coraline, and she almost found herself cracking into a full-blown smile at the news.

The day went on and piled her workload high, for all that Bernstein had shouldered as many of the domestic affairs as he could. The attacks seemed to be dwindling in number, but the body count stayed high and the reports and her now-rote statements still had to be provided. She had to address Congress halfway through the day; rehashing the same condolences she'd given the public mixed with some more forward planning and promises of all possible retaliation.

The intelligence agencies were unusually quiet. Many of the foreign agencies were tied in matters on their home soil, and any who weren't were, she imagined, working flat-out on finding the Tantibalic Tendency.

Old emergency preparedness plans were dusted off, altered where necessary, and invoked to corral the efforts of the vying defence agencies. Proposals for her evacuation were deflected (she was determined, no matter what, to _not_ leave the wounded city), proposals to evacuate homeless and injured civilians to places with the facilities to care for them were passed through with her approval.

She confirmed rumours that the creature behind the attack on Washington and mastermind of the Tantibalic Tendency was indeed a psychephage, and that it was likely a rogue one, acting against its own kind in its insanity. The creature slotted neatly into the role of 'villain' in the overall narrative, and the day ticked on, winding towards the evening and the tail end of the season's storms.

There came no word from Nevada save that the project was underway and that Wybie sent his love.

On the first night, whatever parts of the world slept were haunted with nightmares, and those awake received no respite from their own waking terrors.

* * *

><p>On the second day…<p>

"What was that, ma'am?" The question came from the Secretary of the Department of the Supernatural, Maria's old deputy, over a phone.

"I'm going to be reckless and venture that Tantibus was somehow involved," said Coraline, pinching at her red eyes and tapping her free hand against the rim of a steaming coffee mug. The nightmares had afflicted nearly everyone sleeping, with dark thoughts and paranoia afflicting those awake. Nobody had been spared them, although they had been afflicted to varying degrees.

Personally, Coraline felt she could have very done without spending the night running endlessly down dark and twisting passages, pursued by clacking needle-feet and piercing and mocking voices while her vision misted over with dark cross-lines of blood, obscured but for four clear circles over each eye … and she was in an understandable foul mood for it. Waking up drenched in cold sweat and trembling as she tried to pick apart the dream from the night-lit reality around her hadn't been any fun either.

The answer she'd given the Director was true, she believed, but if it was, then it disturbed the hell out of her. There could be no reasonable way Tantibus could have exerted that amount of power, to give every single person in the world, practically all of whom would have been outwith an Eroder-cast field, nightmares and waking horrors. It should be impossible.

Unless it could seep its power out from existing Sur-real places in the world, with the strength of the nightmares diminishing with distance and thus accounting for the varying strengths, unless it really _did_ have or had acquired that much raw power to throw around.

"What effect has it been having?" she asked.

"I've been talking to the FBI and Press Office, and as far as we can tell, not enough to spur riots, but enough to leave people rattled," said the Secretary, her tone careful and considerate. "Everyone's scared of Tantibus now if they weren't before. They can make speculations of their own when they find out that everyone else around them had nightmares right after the President confirmed that a powerful Sur-real creature's on the loose. There are worries that it'll escalate the next night and … and there's been a few cases where people right next to what we suspect could be Sur-real doorways haven't woken up yet, and can't be woken no matter what. They've just stayed sleeping, but turning and trashing and … and _screaming_ without waking up. Anaesthetics calm them, but when they wear off…"

"I get the picture."

With all the possible areas for Sur-real bleedthrough in her own nation impossible to account for, and no feasible way of evacuating the areas around them if they were identified, there was nothing Coraline could do about this one save wait and hope to blazes it didn't happen the next night.

Not so for the next significant item to cross her path, a handful of hours later.

She was still in her office when the call came through from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Micah.

It wasn't every day that you got a lead pinpointing the location of a Tantibalic Tendency base; and that was why those days ought to be valued.

"You're sure it's a base for them, General?"

"Yes, Madam President. It's believed to be a storehouse for the most part, accommodating around forty of their agents. Certainly not their main base of operations, but it's most likely a regional hub for them, it'll likely contain intelligence we can badly use, and it's on our soil." General Micah could normally sound assured when in the midst of a hurricane. It spoke volumes that some note

"What forces do we have in the area?"

"A company from the 17th Cavalry's been prepped, organised according to established entry-and-retrieval protocols, and is ready for immediate deployment. All they need is your go-ahead."

"They have it."

* * *

><p>Ninety minutes later, they had a victory.<p>

Coraline had spent those minutes flitting between the makeshift Situation Room and her office, fielding calls from other heads of state while a seemingly-abandoned farmhouse in Iowa found itself the recipient of an invasion.

"Our casualties were minimal," said Micah, after the raid had wound down. "We estimate around half of theirs fell in the initial gunfight, and the remainder fled through a doorway to the Sur-real. They made attempts to destroy their logs before they left, but the officers on the ground were able to recover a fair amount. A fair amount's ciphered, but that won't last for long."

"Pass whatever they got on to the CIA. They're working round the clock on what scraps they've got, and they'll probably want new things to play with."

The Press Office would want a piece of it as well, and Coraline was happy to give it to them; thinking on the ramifications of the successful raid as she looked round at the screens flashing images from it; at smoke tumbling from open windows, wood shards littering dusty floorboards, scissored bodies lying slumped in spreading dark pools while armed and armoured soldiers stepped carefully around them, holding briefcases and folded-up electronics.

Even if nothing else came from it, it would serve as a suitable antidote to the nightmare plague for many people, knowing that the Tantibalic Tendency were stoppable.

The rest of the day, as these things could be measured, passed relatively quietly. The reports of attacks abated, and the raid was cautiously taken as the potential reversal of fortunes that Coraline hoped it would be. There even came reports of attacks by the Tendency in Bolivia and the East African Federation being thwarted, of bombs being discovered and their agents either being killed or fleeing.

These same reports were marred, however, by the news that as the Tantibalics fled, they took people with them into the Sur-real. Either hostages they'd already captured or people dragged struggling off the street as they went, taken to a fate that, since it involved a fear-eating soul consuming monster, Coraline could assume involved very few upsides for the victims.

She devoted the rest of the evening and night either sending messages of support to the nation and troops involved with the raid or going over these reports with the Security Council, and she ended up falling asleep at her desk in the small hours of the morning.

On the second night, the world was reseeded with nightmares.

* * *

><p>On the third day, the world simmered.<p>

"What's the mood on the streets?" asked a sleep-deprived Coraline, who, while nursing a creaking neck from her position leaning on the desk, kept reaching one hand nervously up to her remaining eye as a consequence of the nightmares, subconsciously checking that it was still there.

"People won't last for much longer," said the similarly sleep-deprived Director of Homeland Security, to nods from others in the cabinet. "More people are comatose. Nearly everyone is on edge. One night of nightmares was horrific and unsettling enough, another right after has made more than a few think about nothing apart from how they can make it stop. And when they can see no way of destroying Tantibus and they can't see their government doing so either, then they're going to think hard about that message from two days ago. They'll become desperate."

"Desperate enough to take a shot at me and divide us further and feed _more_ fear towards Tantibus." Coraline would have likely broken something had the only she'd been holding not been her own neck. "Hell's bells. It's laid this out. It's _thought_ about this."

From mass devastation where everyone could see it, to promises of salvation if civil war ensued amidst the devastation, to constant and growing nightmares that promised only one outcome. At this rate, if Tantibus could keep on terrorising the world's dreams and still remained beyond their grasp, they'd lose in a week. Most likely less.

"We do what's necessary," said the President, coldly, reluctantly. "The governors in every state have placed the National Guard on standby to help maintain order. If everyone remains calm, great. If not, we can hold them at bay. If the guard's compromised, then the citizens will be the least of our problems. And we hope that every other country can do the same."

Words that involved the possibility of wielding military force against your own people ought to have been harder to say. They should have involved torturous soul-searching and argument over objections and the most carefully worded of statements while every other part of your energies was devoted to fixing the problem that required this sort of stopgap.

Instead, they involved the Secretary nodding while General Micah said "I'll make the calls,", and while the CIA worked in impenetrable silence in some other rooms out of her sight.

The victory yesterday would mean nothing in the face of this, she realised. It hadn't fixed their problems, it didn't stop the terrors sent against them, and now they were stepping closer to beginning to destroy themselves.

Despair like this would only help Tantibus, she acknowledged. But without a reason for hope; without lead, clue, means, weapons, or targets, what was there to inspire hope? What was there that wouldn't deceive people?

_For the hope of others_, replied a part of her. _So that others don't see their psychephage-hunting President give up. You don't want to be insincere? So what? This isn't even close to being small enough to be about what you want._

She watched the other end of the table, chin supported by her linked hands, brooding while others spoke and papers shifted and screens flickered.

_Why have hope at all if not for moments like this?_

There came the beginning of a muffled conversation from outside the Situation Room as General Micah began to present revised plans for securing strategic buildings in the event of Sur-real attack. The national security team resettled, and Coraline tried to ignore everything in favour of the General.

"The Basilica Plan would require co-operation from multiple Departments, and it would need to be checked against the knowledge we possess on psychephages," he started, as the conversation continued. "The initial proposal is that each vital building which we know to be open to the Sur-real or near a Sur-real entry point be, if it and its contents cannot reasonably be relocated, reinforced with…"

"Ma'am?" came the voice of one of the door guards from a small intercom on the desk by Coraline. "The Director of the CIA requests entry to the meeting, claiming that the matter permits a protocol breach. What's your call?"

"Let her in," said Coraline, intrigued.

The door slid open, and the CIA Director stepped in, her own eyes red bloodshot with weariness. The sort, however, not born of a bad sleep, but of the absence of any sleep at all. She held a file in a sealed case by her side, her fingers impatiently tapping on its side. The room hushed as she stepped in, Micah halting and acknowledging her with a nod.

"Madam President?" said the Director, breathlessly.

"What is it, Director?"

"We found them," she said. She looked from Coraline to the rest of the room. "We know where they are." She reached down, snapping open the hard case as she did so. "Let me show you…"

Coraline sat bolt-upright, more alert and ready than she'd ever been, an unbidden fire rising in her. "Their base of operations? Where?"

Papers fanned across the table. "In Russia. In the Ural Mountains. At Mount Narodnaya."

* * *

><p>On the third day, it was night in Nevada. Or at least you'd have thought so, from the thick bank of stormclouds overhead. Colour diminished to black skies, grey desert, white salt flats, and silver networks of lightning pulsing far above amidst a constant thunder.<p>

To Wybie, it seemed only appropriate.

"The team that placed the device are back, Mr Lovat," said Vasili, looking from a phone and up at Wybie past a hood dripping with water. "The prototype should be ready when we are."

"They called me mad, you know!" cackled Wybie, his own coat buttoned up and hood left down, his hair refusing to be flattened by anything so trivial as a thunderstorm's downpour. "Mad! But they'll never call me mad again after tonight!"

"I didn't say you were mad," said Vasili cautiously, calmingly. "I just thought the project was inapplicable on the basis of our current knowledge and technology. I'd not considered the Cleveland-Holly device, nor had I correctly estimated the capacity of an internal assembly. Nor had I correctly estimated how much welding and mathematics one man could do in three days."

"Mad! They shall _all_ be shown!"

"Indeed. Shall we get ourselves ready?"

Vasili, for his part, hoped that the storm wouldn't confound the experiment in whatever fashion, and also hoped for a weapon and a wall to back up against whenever the First Gentleman started talking like … like _that_.

Of the past seventy-two hours, Wybie had spent perhaps three of them asleep. The rest had been invested into the ferrobomb, into the math and blueprints and prototype about to explode just north of them, across the Lake Groom salt flat. Fortified by caffeine and adrenaline pills, he'd made it from a cheerful eagerness, which had devolved to a careful and cool focus, which drifted into a drowsy haze, which reassembled itself into irritability, and which had flickered between previous stages before finally alighting onto something which Vasili felt would be happier sewing bits of body together.

The several other scientists and technicians sharing the platform with them reached for reinforced goggles, complete with lead-lined and radiation-reading face masks, brushing some of the constant downpour off them as they did so. A sudden flash of lightning split the sky open above them, a roar of thunder chasing on its heels.

"Send the signal, minions! Let the whole _world_ wonder at what I've done!" Wybie said, muffled by his own mask.

"Will you comply with sedatives later, Mr Lovat?" Vasili felt his lab assistant would rise far in the profession for ensuring those sorts of precautions.

"Fine! But let it be triggered! In fact, pass it to me."

Against every common-sense neuron firing in his brain, Vasili passed the radio trigger over. Wybie took it, smiled a sinister slash behind his mask, and jabbed the trigger.

The device they'd made had a low yield, inasmuch as these things could be applied to nuclear weapons. One kiloton had seemed sufficient, and even that from this long distance was terrifying to behold.

In the split second after the trigger had been pressed, the world had seemed to hold its breath.

Then came the flash, a pure white-gold blaze that battered even at the team's shielded eye lenses, fiercer and more violent than anything the sun could conjure up. Along with it came the noise, a massive earth-shaking rumble that persisted after the flash, and along with the shockwave of torn-up ground and ash.

Above that shockwave rose a great plume of smoke and dust, silhouetted against the fading flash and outdone lightning. Rings of dust rolled out across the skies as the plume rose, condensed, lost its fire as it became grey as stone.

Throughout, the scientists stared with keen interest, or eagerly pointed out in low tones aspects that indicated an iron-producing reaction, or gasped, or were lost in their own thoughts.

Not Wybie, who knew in his sleep-addled heart exactly what the situation demanded.

"MuahahahahaHAHAHAHA-HA!"


	13. Threshold

The images before Coraline on the table were blurry, indistinct, but still gave the impression of some small steel structure on the slopes of a black-and-grey mountain. Considering them, she asked the Director "How did you find out?"

"We first thought about where the Tantibalic Tendency would hide themselves," started the Director. "We knew we couldn't apply the same geographic limitations to them that we could to other groups, since Sur-real travel would let them circumvent any distance."

She pulled out one paper from the bottom, which appeared to be a report from the Department of the Supernatural. "But we realised early that other limitations would apply to them. If they truly would form their headquarters around a psychephage's lair, then we could narrow it down. Furthermore, we could determine that it would likely be in a remote location if we hadn't seen obvious movements on their part before. Every agency worldwide combed through their country's ruins, mountains, remote monuments, any place that people would call significant and that could serve as a hidden headquarters for the Tantibalics."

"Mount Narodnaya wasn't an immediate candidate, but this first image from one of the Russian satellites alerted us to the structure on its north side. It wasn't listed on any records, classified or otherwise. Further scanning and imaging from our own satellites gave us more detail - and let us identify figures in Tantibalic armour around the perimeter and several defensive emplacements bearing some of the weapons stolen from our own bases."

"And though that alone doesn't necessarily prove it to be _the_ base, the relatively poor image quality, according to the Department of the Supernatural, asserts the presence of a powerful Sur-real field to have muddied the digital imaging. This in turn infers a powerful psychephage."

"Strange that the base hadn't been noticed before," said Coraline, scrutinising the picture. "Especially if the mountain's such a landmark."

"Not that strange. European Russia was devastated by the Grey Plague. They simply didn't have the presence in the region to know that it existed."

"It doesn't seem like that large a structure either," said Coraline, squinting at the scale in the photograph's corner.

"We believe it to be just a covering structure, containing a minimal barracks and gun emplacements," said the Director. "The Department of the Supernatural conjectured that the doorway to Tantibus's lair would lie inside the mountain itself, and that it would be connected to the outside via a tunnel network…"

"Wait," said Coraline. "You're saying the bulk of their headquarters would be inside the mountain itself?"

The Director nodded.

"Oh, _good_," said Coraline. "Because if there was one thing I wanted to do with my life, it was fight a friggin' James Bond villain."

"What defences do we know them to have?" asked General Micah.

"Motorgun emplacements, likely some manner of rocket system, and one of the analysts suggested that a particular heat signature matched that of an electron lance, likely one of those taken from the Massachusetts base. Beyond that, we believe they were counting more on discretion than firepower in their defence."

"If you have any way of doubly-confirming this, do so," said Coraline. "General, put a call through to the Ferrobomb Project. Let's see if they've got anything for us."

* * *

><p>On a small, barren, officially non-existent island off the coast of California, there was a small and well-armed military base, built around one of the old stockpiles.<p>

The world before the Grey Plague had struck had managed to produce a prodigious number of weapons of mass destruction. The world after the Grey Plague had agreed to put the weapons aside and dismantle them all in a careful and timely manner, dividing them into stockpiles to be overseen by different nations.

This particular base was co-guarded by forces from the US Navy and the Armada de México, who maintained parity of numbers while rotating between commanding officers.

It also played host to a batragaunt, an ennui-eater, who had slipped below the Concord's radar and spent a peaceful few years sipping from the boredom of the troops assigned to the quiet duty. The psychephage hadn't concerned itself much with the larger workings of the world and the Sur-real. It hadn't seen the need.

It was at rest in its monochrome and barren lair when it became aware of a point opening into the wider Sur-real behind it.

It turned, with no great alarm, to examine what was causing the disturbance, when it was abruptly overpowered.

Tantibus held it pinned, leisurely winding out thin claws from its flickering form and breathing in with satisfaction as the desperate psychephage struggled.

Behind it, from the doorway from which it'd entered, several squads of black-armoured Tantibalics marched through the lair, making for the exit to the base's cafeteria.

Tantibus casually ripped scream after scream free from the batragaunt, tearing it slowly open and making sure it could watch as it did so, keeping only one eye on its followers.

"Go forth to your target," it said. "Send forth the atomic fire. Leave at least one for your questioning should you need it."

* * *

><p>They had reached Vasili at the other end of the line, who had been caught just as he was about to phone them, to mutual pleasant surprise all round.<p>

"I'm afraid the First Gentleman is … ah, busy recuperating from his efforts over the last few days, Ms Jones," said Vasili. "But by those efforts, we have a functioning ferrobomb. Our first prototype was tested less than half an hour ago, and it produced exactly the effect we were hoping for. The iron residue in the surrounding area would be almost certainly lethal to any psychephage."

Coraline smiled a lean, wolfish smile, her eye gleaming. "That's _excellent_, Mr Vasili. When can you produce another?"

"Theoretically, in a matter of hours. Now that the process has been shown to work, we need but follow the blueprints we used for the prototype and produce another to the same effect. However, I would not advise using a copy of the prototype. In its current form, it possesses features that would make it cumbersome in any military operation."

"Such as?"

"It is timer-activated, instead of using a radio transmission for activation. From what I understand of the Sur-real literature, it must be taken into the Sur-real itself to hurt a creature within, else you will simply destroy the existing doorway to no other consequence. Using a timer model would be inappropriate, considering the opportunity for interference and the time needed to escape the blast radius."

"How long would a model with a functioning radio transmission take to create?"

"I couldn't say, ma'am, as we would literally have to discover the science as we went. It has been built with the same manner of Sur-real shielding found in Eroders, so the device itself would have no problem surviving its environment. But to find a means of creating radio waves that survive a Sur-real environment, let alone that can be sent from the outside world… I cannot guarantee anything."

"Then find out, as soon as possible, whether or not it can be done with what we have at hand. If not, then we'll adapt to circumstances."

Vasili nodded and signed off, promising to extend Coraline's best wishes to Wybie as he went. The security settled.

"For a strike on the facility, with the aim of deploying such a weapon…" started General Micah, "I would use a squadron from the Rocket Regiment. They're already mobilised. Their equipment has been field-tested before. Such a force could lift off from Atlanta and be in the Urals in less than an hour."

"A rapid insertion could work," mused Coraline. "And the sight of our rockets, armed and packed to the gunwales, flying to finish the job once and for all … that wouldn't hurt either."

They started planning, Coraline taking Micah and others' advice for a conventional operation, and adding details where dealing with Tantibus would become necessary.

A force of five hundred infantrymen, with accompanying specialists, to deal with targets on the ground and to clear out the base and tunnel network itself.

The rockets themselves, massive and armoured and as mobile as any gunship, to engage the defensive emplacements and any armour the Tantibalics could bring to bear.

A strike team, equipped with ferroshot-loaded weaponry, to engage Tantibus if it threatened their forces.

They had just made their way to discussing a potential plan for deploying a timer-activated ferrobomb when a phone call came through for the general.

He excused himself to answer it, leaving Coraline to consider the outline of what was being called Operation Lightning Strike. She looked over the outline of the troops planned for the operation.

It wasn't every day when you appreciated just how much a rocket corps could come in handy. She blessed the strangely farsighted lunacy of the Ackerman Administration, and turned her gaze back to the CIA brief.

It wasn't every day you got to plan a battle that would partly take place inside a mountain for that matter. It was just as well she hadn't counted on having any more normal days once she'd been inaugurated. Not that her days beforehand could have ever been accounted normal, but the point was…

She heard a choke from Micah.

"What?" he said, his voice low and urgent. "That couldn't … though if they used the Sur-real – who's responding? Is anyone-? Good. And the guncutters as well. Send the word. If there's friendly fire, then there'll be pardons and posthumous decorations. Just stop this. _Now_."

"What is it?" asked Coraline, concerned at Micah's tone, facing the general as he wheeled away from the phone.

"The Tantibalics are attacking the Mazewood Island stockpile. They're playing for keeps, and I'm sending everything we have to cut them off. Before we _burn_."

* * *

><p>"Aside."<p>

The three Tantibalics assigned to extracting the launch codes for some of the devices from the base's commander, Captain Álvarez, stepped aside at the command from Tantibus. The creature slid closer to the bloodied captain, the soft breath of its passage over the control office's floor set jarringly against his pained, rattling breaths.

"Speak to me of your own accord," the psychephage ordered.

Álvarez, gasping as he did so, spat a thin dribble of blood at it.

Tantibus reached down, a grey rope uncoiling from its hand as it did so.

The sound of Álvarez's shrieks almost, but not quite, drowned out the roar and clatter of gunfire from the roof, where motorgun fire from circling guncutters tore chunks out of the walls and defending Tantibalics. Outside the room's reinforced window, down which a long crack ran, the _USS Ashland_ drove white streaks through the churning water, spitting blazing streams of fire towards the base.

"The codes are stored in a safe next to the devices," said Tantibus, once Álvarez was a corpse. "The lock on the safe must be broken, and the wall opened so that the weapon may be let loose."

The three Tantibalics hurried away, staggering when the impacting fire from the ship rocked the entire base. Tantibus remained where it was, drinking in the fear of its own servants in the base, directing desperate fire from the remains of the roof and from windows and gun emplacements, from the semi-butchered prisoners left to die where they lay, from the distant enemy in their war-engines.

This one battle was a feast.

One of the guncutters swept overhead, strafing the roof with lethal swathes of fire, and Tantibus became aware of the pilot at the engine's head, along with the squads of soldiers ready to rappel out. It was the work of a second to reach up and send it swerving downwards, crashing into the rocks of the island amidst roaring flames and slashing metal. Those that didn't die outright fed Tantibus as their broken bodies burned alive.

The battle was not enough. It was _never_ enough.

It decided to investigate its servants' progress.

They had broken the safe, and were huddled around one of the dozens of weapons in this most supposedly-secure part of the base, arming it while the world shuddered around them.

"There is no natural portal for this room, Lord," said one of them as Tantibus neared. "They didn't see fit to include such a feature in a base meant only for the weapons' destruction…"

"Will it guide itself to its destination once armed?" asked Tantibus.

"Yes, Lord."

Tantibus turned to the wall, and, exerting a significant amount of the power left to it (the inflicted nightmares had thus far replenished only a little of what they had cost), ripped open the reinforced concrete, sending shards and rubble crashing outwards into the chopping sea. The Tantibalics winced at the increased roar of battle.

"Arm it. Release it."

They set about their task with a renewed fervour, tapping in the last override and activation codes into the missile's keypad just as a guncutter rotated round to the opened hole, aiming its weapons inside. Tantibus saw they had finished their task as the weapon's thrusting engines started to flare, and saw no need to interfere.

Motorgun fire cut down the three Tantibalics, and glided off the armoured side of the missile, which rose on blazing hover-thrusters and angled itself towards the window, just before it rocketed forwards.

The guncutter would have impeded it, but the rocket had been keyed to a destination, and would not have detonated by any errant impact. It was armoured, it had momentum, and it sheared straight through the light guncutter like a heated blade through butter, sending metal-shards and smoke spewing from the ruptured aircraft as it sped clear, arcing through the sky as it did so.

Arcing eastwards.

Tantibus would have preferred more to have been loosed. But one would suffice, and there was nothing else here it needed.

Anti-missile systems from the ship slashed out at the speeding missile to no effect as it streaked overhead. The base blazed and guncutters circled and Tantibalics died and Tantinus took its leave as the ship's captain screamed into a radio, "They've launched a missile, General! I repeat, _they've made a launch!_"

* * *

><p>Through the skyline of Arizona, a metal point cut a trail of light.<p>

In the city of Phoenix, people on the streets stopped, surprised, to stare and point.

A second later, half a million of them turned to ash.

* * *

><p>She had failed.<p>

Coraline looked at the screens full of fire, at panicking crowds, at video footage from the battle around Mazewood Island, at tears and screaming and too much fire, and knew that she had failed.

And once you had already failed, she knew, there was nothing you could do but not fail again. You would have no excuse.

Something stretched thin inside her broke then, beneath the screens. Something that had tried to hold on over the last few days, and which now vanished like a wisp.

Bernstein spoke; she didn't notice him. People demanded retaliation; she was too busy planning it to give them heed. She didn't let herself feel, didn't let herself rest.

She knew then what she had to do.

She would pick up every weapon at her disposal. She would bring destruction to those would bring it, death to those who would deal it, fear to the fear-eater.

"You will prepare another ferrobomb of the same make as the prototype," she ordered Vasili over a screen. "You will ship it along with my husband."

"The timer…" he started.

"Can be worked with," she said, and left him there.

To Micah, she said, "How soon can the force for Operation Lightning Strike be prepared?"

"Twelve hours," he replied.

"It'll leave the moment it's ready and has a ferrobomb attached. And stay ready for changes to it," she said, and left him there.

On a monitor near her as she passed came images of National Guard holding the line in multiple states. Desperation had burst like a bubble, and there had already been deaths as a result.

Those two orders had come easily. They required no more than words from her.

What would come next, what had come unbidden as a strange notion to her mind and had refused to go away, would be harder.

How much was she really prepared to sacrifice? For this would risk everything she had ever fought for, all her life's work, everything she valued and yet more…

This was far beyond being about what was important to her. She had to defend others, as she had always done in some form or another. And this way, she and others would get their revenge.

As she set off to her next destination, a treacherous little voice whispered _You don't know that you'll need them, you don't know that they'll be necessary, you'll be throwing away everything for nothing, don't do this to yourself…_

It was crushed with _Every weapon at my disposal._

_No more excuses. No more failures. No matter the cost._

* * *

><p>The Eroder clicked to life, and Coraline stepped into the room, the smell of honeysuckle pressing against her and the shadows deepening.<p>

The Ambassador stepped out of a manifesting doorway a minute or two later, and gave her a careful, frank look. She held her cup and saucer steady.

"Call the Court," said Coraline. "I have a deal for you."

The Ambassador stepped back and sang, and the shadows twisted into rectangles, the light into frames, and countless doors opened around her, spilling in unearthly light, casting eerie shadows of their own, admitting the forms of creature that changed as they moved, creatures that, in this mercurial light … Coraline admitted … were beautiful from a certain perspective.

Apart from the nuckelavee, of course, but against some things even subjective beauty contended in vain.

They assembled in a rough circle around her and the Ambassador, as before, but this time with greater interest. They were ready to hear her out.

She reached into a pocket of her coat and drew out, slowly, a vial of silvery liquid. She reached into another pocket and drew out a sheath of folded paper.

"This -" she said, wiggling the vial, "- Is soul-matter. This is what we synthesise so that you don't have to feed on us or each other."

She held aloft the papers. "And _these_ are the recipes."

The room was utterly silent, save for the shifting of bodies to get a closer look.

Coraline continued. "You're as smart as humans, we learned that. You can make. You can learn. You can fear and hate and love just as we do. And I bet that there's somewhere in the Sur-real you can extract the chemicals needed. I bet you can alter your worlds in such a way as to produce what you need. You can make your own better world, and help us in making ours in the process. We don't have to fight, we don't have to be in conflict – we can interact with each other as we wish to interact. No dependency, no aggression, no hunting of each other. We can be equals, or partners, or totally separate. But we can both _choose _that."

She knelt slowly down, and with one push, gently sent the sheath sliding across the floor to the Ambassador, who could only stare at it.

"And that was good faith," said Coraline. "Nothing more."

The Ambassoder rested her cup on the saucer, and picked up the papers, cradling them gently in her long fingers as though they were a holy artefact. The other psychephages pressed in closer, murmuring and hissing and craning.

"My hand's been forced by Tantibus. I cannot press for your support from here, but I can only…"

"No," said the Ambassador. "Promises are important. Pledges are more so. Deals are sacrosanct. The prices of allegiances are great, and this is greater than what I had expected." She looked round at the Court. "What _any_ of the kin were expecting. You have our allegiance, Stormcrow, Harbinger, Oncoming Storm, Coraline Jones. You shall find the battle, and for this hope we shall fight for ourselves and for your kind."

She had a weapon. But if what they had said earlier was correct, then not a complete one.

"We cannot guarantee that we can still meet the Old Terror in open battle without serious cost, or without defeat," said the Ambassador. "Unless you have stockpiles of the synthetic, we will not be as strong as we once were, and we never could face it openly even then."

And there it was, raising its head again.

She had prepared for this.

"In which case," said Coraline, "Let me propose this…"

And she told them the rest of her plan, in detail.

The Ambassador considered it, and then nodded.

"That … would seem doable. It has been done before in partnerships between the kin. Though I must ask if you…"

"I wouldn't have offered it if I hadn't thought about the implications. And even if they were worse than I could imagine, I would still go ahead with it."

Silence. Then, "When shall we…"

"Not now. I'll call for you before our own army goes to fight the Tantibalics. We'll get it done then."

"And what shall be the signal?"

Coraline considered appropriate signals, deciding on a code word, and then deciding on something easy to remember and unlikely to be said at any other point by her. "I'll say a word. 'Armageddon'."

"Then at Armageddon's call, we shall render our allegiance."

* * *

><p>Wybie had returned with the ferrobomb in tow. Coraline met him, kissed him for as long a moment as possible before people nearby started coughing uncomfortably, explained (some of) the situation to the tune of "What?" and "Huh, I hadn't considered that as a compromise," and "You didn't even have to ask,", and then took him to Micah and Bernstein.<p>

Not immediately. She made one detour along the way, to an aide to whom she gave orders to retrieve something personal of hers from a storeroom in the back of the Thaddeus Complex.

"We have a ferrobomb, General," said Coraline when they found the pair. "Are the plans still open to be amended?"

"They are," said Micah. "To what extent?"

"To the extent of two extra passengers," said Coraline. "We're going with the strike-force."


	14. Gambit

There was a call that had to be made before the operation could go ahead.

Typically, when you were launching a military strike into a friendly power's territory, it was good manners to tell them beforehand, and common sense to see if they could provide help. Coraline wasn't optimistic about the latter, but the call to the recently-arisen President Ekaterina of the Reunited Russian State went ahead anyway.

The other woman listened to the plan, her form upright in her chair but slumped slightly with fatigue, her eyes bloodshot around the edges, her blonde hair in slight disarray. Coraline remembered that she'd only been the Deputy Prime Minister until a few nights ago, everyone above her in the government annihilated in a chain of attacks by the Tendency. Strain was expected to be shown under the circumstances.

"You speak of asking for my permission," said Ekaterina once Coraline had finished, the auto-translator giving a crackling edge to her words. "But I cannot help but think that that is but a pleasantry. You would not arrange such an attack you speak of if you did not intend to go through with it in any case."

"We will do whatever's necessary to deal with the Tantibalic Tendency as quickly as possible. If doing that entails apologising and making any needed reparations later, then that's the price we'll pay."

"The price will come higher than that, I think." Ekaterina thought for a moment, and then said "Our assistance will be limited. Our mobile forces and their command structure were gutted by Tantibalic bombs. We have armour in the region, but they may not be able to be deployed quickly enough for your tastes."

"How quickly? As an estimate."

"Twenty four hours. Maybe more, maybe less. And they will face difficulties traversing mountainous terrain."

"We'll be ready to send in the Rocket Regiment in less than four. But if …"

"I would advise you make arrangements to alert others and I in the event of your failure," said Ekaterina. "Then we can spend whatever will be necessary to destroy them, if such can be done."

"I was planning on notifying other governments once we're finished here."

Ekaterina considered. Then, "How do you plan to fight the psychephage itself?"

Coraline hesitated. "I'll be going with the strike force, and a select team amongst the soldiers will be armed with ferroshot." It wasn't the whole truth, but Coraline didn't know whether or not Ekaterina and others around her had been compromised by Tantibus. This call alone had been a gamble.

"Truly? We all must play to our strengths, I suppose." Ekaterina nodded wearily. "Very well, this issue needs no confounding. You have my permission to send in your rockets. It will make little difference in the end, I think."

The call ended, and Coraline pulled off the headset, turning in her chair to face Bernstein.

"I'll have to ask you to handle notifying other governments," said Coraline. "Because I don't feel I've saddled you with enough duties in the past, and I thought I'd make up for lost time."

"Somewhere in China, there's going to be a very confused family when a coffin marked 'Hawkwood' comes spinning up through the floor of their house," said Bernstein wearily. "You know one of the joys of being a leader is being able to order other people to kill things on your behalf. You don't have to put yourself into the fire. You have other battles to fight."

"None of them half so well as I can fight this one," replied Coraline. "I've got the most experience of anyone on the planet in fighting psychephages. If Tantibus confronts the team openly, then I'll be needed."

"It had no difficulty dispatching you the last time it struck."

"The last time, it ambushed us," said Coraline, her jaw setting with anger. "This time, I'll be armed and armoured and have a regiment's worth of firepower on my side."

She didn't mention the other aspect of her plan. _That_ she intended to operate on a purely need-to-know basis, which included herself, the Ambassador, and several hundred other psychephages who were in on the deal.

She hadn't even told Wybie, and she told herself that it would have only distracted from what he needed to do with the ferrobomb. Even though she knew that was a half-cooked justification, she clung to it anyway.

She didn't want to tell him. She didn't want to see his reaction.

Bernstein left just as the aide she'd sent out earlier to the Thaddeus Complex returned, sweating and muttering curses as they struggled with a deceptively heavy box.

Thanking them as they left, Coraline opened the box, gently taking out the contents one by one.

A combat shotgun, the stock and barrel of which were lined with iron for when close-quarters combat became necessary, along with an accompanying box of ferroshot shells.

A trench knife, a nasty little piece of work she'd commissioned shortly after the affair on the Ellipse. The combat knife's blade was pure iron, as was the spike-studded knuckle guard. They'd become standard issue along with ferroshot for operatives working under her.

A black peaked cap, dusty with age and lack of use. She smiled as she drew it out, dusting it off briefly before she tried it back on. She regretfully came to the conclusion that it wouldn't gel with the helmet she'd have to don, and left it resting on her desk.

And the last…

The midnight-blue folds of the trench coat unfurled to the ground as she held it up, keeping a firm grip on the weighty garment. The chainmail inside would need a little cleaning, but apart from that, it would serve as well as it had ever done.

She shrugged it on, embracing the familiar weight across her shoulders, all but feeling the memories of battles hard fought and won, of blows and lightning-swift cuts turned aside by the iron inside it. She put the shotgun and knife back inside the box, hefting each one as she did so and remembering their weight and balance.

She was back where she should be.

The intercom on her desk crackled to life.

"Madam President?" came Moloney's voice. "The motorcade's ready outside."

"I'm ready," she said.

* * *

><p>From her office to the motorcade took two minutes. From the motorcade's starting point to Air Force One took five. From Washington to the base in Georgia would take two hours.<p>

Coraline spent that time scouring her coat's mail, making calls to assorted officers and other governments, and with Wybie, discussing tactics.

"Placing it will be an issue," he said. "Being inside its blast radius once we've placed it in the Sur-real will be inconvenient, assuming we want to come out of this as something other than vaguely metallic ash puddles. Do we know anything about what the inside of its lair will be like?"

"It feeds on fear, so we can make a few assumptions about how it'll have shaped its world. It doesn't seem unreasonable to believe there'll be shadowy recesses that'll prevent anyone just outside the entryway getting hit by some of the blast."

"Possibly. I just wish there was some way of confirming that. Is our working plan, by the way, still going to be rushing in with a squadron, placing it somewhere and setting the timer to something stupidly short, and then getting Tantibus's attention away from the bomb while making a fighting retreat back to the exit?"

"It's open to elaboration on some aspects."

"I really dislike your plans. They always involve danger and more explosions than are healthy in my vicinity."

"Please. How often have you actually been hurt carrying them out?"

Wybie took a breath, and raised one hand; fingers spread and ready to be counted off.

"The point is, we've pulled off victories with less planning than this," Coraline said hastily. "We took on a centuries-old beldam with a fire extinguisher, a chair, and an axe at our prom. We spent all of nineteen dollars on what we needed to take down the Czarina. This time round, we're coming in prepared. We've got an _army_."

"So does Tantibus."

"We've got a _better_ army."

"Those other times we had Maria."

"And we're doing this for her. Wherever her soul's gone, she's going to see us stop anyone else from being hunted down by Tantibus. We'll finish the job she helped start, once and for all."

Wybie's frown diminished, replaced by a sad, crooked smile. "There is that," he conceded. "And at least you won over the Court. If they show up, we're probably less likely to die, through explosions or otherwise."

Coraline tried once more to find the courage to tell him what she'd planned.

Then he looked round to stare out the window, his dark and creased face breaking into a wide and innocent smile as he took in the sun-hued landscape passing below them, and her resolve vanished with barely a whisper.

The plane swept down over northern Georgia, passing against the looming shapes of cloud-shrouded mountains as it cut down through the sky. Green forest extended endlessly below it, rustling and shifting in a swift north wind.

Before it, steel-wire and metal rose abruptly from the greenery, massive buildings looming up on a scale to rival the mountains. In them, the sound of clamour and movement rose out and onto the wind, coupled with the slowly rising drone of colossal engines.

In the Blue Ridge Airbase, the Rocket Regiment prepared for war.

* * *

><p>"Madam President, it's an honour to have you here," said the base commander, one Colonel Jin, leading Coraline and Wybie through the corridors leading to the hangars. The echo of footsteps on the chrome floor chased ahead of them, mixing with the rattle of shifting equipment and hurrying soldiers.<p>

"Likewise, Colonel. How far are you into your preparations?" Coraline hugged her coat close around her. The place appeared to have been designed by the same madman responsible for the Thaddeus Complex, with labyrinthine corridors selected over such trivial things as central heating or sensical layout.

"We're almost finished. The troops are boarding, and the crack team requested are just receiving their ferroshot as we speak. The bomb can be loaded on board the _Grant_ the second the base personnel get it there, and the weapons systems just need one more round of calibration before they're good to go."

"That's excellent."

"We also received the … ah, measurements from your office, ma'am. Appropriate suits were found and are ready for yourself and the First Gentleman."

"We'll suit up as soon as we've seen the vessels."

"As you wish, ma'am. They'll be through this door, just overlooking the hangar." Jin opened the door that terminated the stretch of corridor, and Coraline and Wybie stepped briskly through.

The hangar for the rockets was colossal in scale, suited for the huge machines themselves. Two of them were in this hangar, the _Grant _and the _Jackson_, with the other three regimental vessels, the _Eisenhower_, _Harrison_, and _Taylor _occupying their own hangars.

Swarms of mechanics and soldiers still busied over the rockets, which were built to the same approximate shape and dimensions as the long-retired shuttles. Their huge and streamlined bodies, all but groaning under their weight of ablative plating, were being filled with ranks of waiting soldiers and crates of cargo, ramps spilling down from the opened sides. Great gleaming wings swept out from them, blistered over with compact automated motorguns and missile turrets. Heavy-calibre autocannons ran along the length of the body, the ends rotating and seemingly restless. Armour-encased guns sat at nose, beam, and waist, ready and fully loaded.

They were massive and murderous, steel-coated and swift-moving mountains packed to the gunwales with enough raw firepower to give the militaries of most small countries a run for their money.

They had five of them. It would probably be enough.

"I think I'm in love," said Wybie.

"I think I'm more than satisfied," said Coraline, turning away. "Which one will we be aboard, Colonel?"

"Aboard the _Grant_, with Captain Shatner," replied Jin. "It will take the rear in the attack formation, while the _Jackson_ and _Harrison_ take point. The _Eisenhower_ and _Taylor_ will provide support and fill the firing line as needed. We're expecting heavy initial resistance, so we'll go in guns blazing and reserve questions for later."

"Good. Then we'll suit up."

Wybie followed, after being dragged with some reluctance from his vantage point over the rockets, and they were led downstairs to an armoury, where armour had been found for them.

This was no mean feat, with Coraline's five foot nothing and Wybie's near-seven both outwith any reasonable range for armour fitting. Miracles had been worked, however, and empty helmets atop piles of plating faced them as they entered.

"I think this one's mine," said Wybie, picking and staring into his helmet's blue eye-lenses. "The stupidly oversized boots are a dead giveaway."

"Which leaves me the one with the knife and coat next to it," said Coraline, whose personal items had indeed been left next to her armour. She looked up and saw, to her relief, that there were indeed changing rooms leading off from this one. She absently ran a hand over one pocket of her bundled coat, checking that the device she'd placed inside it was still there. Reassured, she turned back to Wybie, halfway through picking up his own bundle, and tried once more for courage.

It was strange, how you could delve into dark places, and face a thousand demons and brave a thousand battles and seek for terrors that were truly unknown, and yet still find some things beyond you.

She didn't contest this failure. She just reached out and, as was the wont between them, pulled Wybie down for a brief kiss, cupping one hand along the lines of his face as she did so, feeling his flesh with her own while there wasn't ceramic and metal between them.

It had to be brief. She was on a clock. So she made it count. And Wybie returned it, not inclined to question this at all.

"Helmets do tend to get in the way of that sort of thing," he said as they pulled apart. "Shall we continue that after?"

"See you in a moment," said Coraline, moving towards her own room.

Once inside, she closed the door and pulled the lock on it shut.

Reaching for her coat pocket, she pulled out the little Eroder inside, mercifully undamaged by its transit, and ready to be set up. Tugging out a loop of wire, she ran it around the circumference of the small changing room. Once done, she set it down on the ground, and pressed the flesh of her thumb onto a point at the top, a small droplet of blood feeding into the device's mechanism.

She jabbed hard at a button on the side of it, and the shadows deepened and the air changed.

A doorway opened, the room filling with an alien light behind her, and Coraline turned to face it.

"We are ready," said the emerging Ambassador. "If you have gone this far, I trust you are as well."

"I am," said Coraline.

"Very well. The rest of the Court will arrive in short order, and we should be able to get this finished equally swiftly."

"Good," said Coraline, projecting outwards calm as best she could.

The Ambassador looked strangely sympathetic, an expression utterly at odds with everything Coraline had come to expect of the creature.

"I must say, I would not have ever expected to be rendering such a thing by a request made in full knowledge," said the Ambassador. "It is a brave thing you do."

"I never expected to be here either," replied Coraline. "Life just throws you surprises, doesn't it? And if it doesn't, you've got to make them yourself."

The air whispered and lines of light began to bloom into existence around the walls, forming the outlines of doors.

"Are you ready?" asked the Ambassador.

"Get it over with," said Coraline. "Just … just one thing. Will it hurt?"

The Ambassador's expression was unreadable, before it broke into that given by a mother to a frightened and confused child.

"No," she said, softly and truthfully. "It won't."

* * *

><p>Wybie knocked on the door to the changing room.<p>

"Coraline?" he called, his voice slightly muffled by the face-covering helemt. "I'm done. The loading's done. All we need is …"

The door's lock clicked then, and it swung open.

Coraline stood framed against the empty room, armoured from head to toe. The eye lenses blazed with a bright blue light out of the blue-grey ceramic helmet, plates in the same colour protecting her torso and limbs, attached to a dark-woven body suit. Over the armour, she had donned her trench coat, which hung down to her knees. Across her left hip, the shotgun hung secured. Against her right leg, the trench knife was strapped.

"I'd feel better if I had the cap," she said, stepping out and taking Wybie's gauntleted hand in her own. "But I suppose I'll have to live without it. Come on. Let's go kill Tantibus."

* * *

><p>Across the Blue Ridge Mountains, the day hung serenely. Wisps of cloud tugged at the tips, green forest rustled, and faint birdcalls whistled through the peaceful air.<p>

Across the steel nestled amidst the mountains, however, came a growing rumble. Roofs, hinged at the sides and halved down the middle, slowly rose with the tremble of straining mechanisms, opening the interior of the hangars to the sky.

From one of them, a rocket slowly took flight, flaring fire behind it and roaring as it rose. Guns rotated across its surface, and light and heat in their purest forms cascaded from its engines.

Beside it, another rose. From a separate hangar alighted another, and another, and a fifth lifted from the last hangar in the base.

The rockets moved in the air, engines firing only gently for now as they shifted into formation. Trees shuddered in the wake of their movement, animals staggered as they moved.

Then, once the machines were in their places, the engines howled with world-splitting force, and the five tore lines of fire across the sky.

They flew to Russia. To war. To Narodnaya.


	15. Vanguard

In the cockpit of the _Grant_, Coraline stood with one hand resting on a wall, and the other on her shotgun's stock. Wybie stood to her right, leaning against the wall as comfortably as could be done when one was doing it in full armour. Before them, two pilots busied themselves over gleaming banks of instruments and number-filled screens. The rocket's commander, Captain Shatner, stood just behind the pilots, keeping his own eye on the readouts.

Outside the cockpit, the world was a white-streaked blur, where the land far below was too distant for colour to be discerned and where the only constants were the other four rockets ahead in formation, black-grey shapes against the clouds.

The vessel was sealed tight, only a few sounds coming from the outside, and the loudest noise audible to Coraline was the clicking and odd chirp from the pilots' displays. One of these was a regular series of four clicks in sequence, indicating continued radio contact with the other rockets. The silence joined with the rush around them united in turn with the uncanny sensation of standing on solid ground (gravity kicked in past a certain speed, courtesy of some technology on the rocket which Coraline gave up trying to understand two sentences in) left her uneasy.

"Eight minutes to target," said Shatner, the words being caught by a microphone he thumbed to life, and being transmitted to the rest of the craft. He turned it off again and said to Coraline "You ever been in a combat zone before, ma'am?"

"In this sense? No."

"Hopefully you won't have to experience this one. We'll unload our contingent after the others have confirmed the base as pacified. Since we'll be hitting them with enough firepower to make half the mountain a crater right off the bat, then that should go like a breeze."

"Beginning deceleration and drop," came the crackling voice of the operation commander. "All vessels stand ready. _Jackson_ and _Harrison_, forward in Pattern Phalanx. _Eisenhower _and _Taylor_, in support of Phalanx in Pattern Barca. _Grant_, forward in Pattern Motley for Phalanx."

The rocket tipped then, gently sliding down to an angle that slid through the cloud cover. Below them, Coraline saw land take form in greens and greys, of steepening foothills meeting dark swathes of forest. Only wisps of clouds remained, and before them, mountains loomed.

The _Jackson_ and _Harrison_ peeled ahead of them, wings flaring with protruding guns and underbellies loosening as they prepared to airdrop their own contingents. The_ Eisenhower _and _Taylor _slid to the sides, ready to provide supporting fire from the left and right. The _Grant_ seemed to slow down, giving the other rockets a generous lead.

The mountains hurtled towards them, and the rockets began to adjust their courses around them. Deceleration to a less-than breakneck speed became necessary, laminating oneself around the scenery was no way to commence this sort of operation; and Coraline felt the lurch of the rocket-powered gravity depowering, leaving them still stable at their relatively flat incline. She still took a firmer grip on the wall, for safety's sake.

"Switching to 'not dying' mode," said one of the pilots, reaching out and switching something that activated powerful multirotor engines along the wings. "We'll take this carefully."

The throb of the newly activated rotors grew above that of the fading rocket engines, and the _Grant_ slipped into a curved trajectory around one of the mountains. Before them, one particularly large peak protruded amidst the others, coming to a blunt top sweeping up out of rugged rock and glacier valleys. Clouds clutched at the tip, and snow covered it like a shroud.

Mount Narodnaya.

The other four rockets, still in a wide formation, slipped around the mountain's side, snow blowing up in clouds where they skimmed over the rock face, lost to the sight of the _Grant_.

Coraline's free hand clenched. "How long until we make a landing?"

"Give the others time to circle round and make contact," replied Shatner, indicating the other rockets in mid-flight around the mountain. "They'll identify the base in the glacier valley, blow up whatever we take by surprise, and then – hang on."

The four clicks from the display denoting contact with the other rockets had lapsed into irregularity, one of them devolving into a mess of buzzing static. One of the pilots frowned and leaned over to the radio.

"We can't lose contact just like that. They've been adapted to rough terrain."

"Sur-real presence," groaned Wybie, clapping one hand against his helmet's visor. "That'll foul with the communication systems before anything else. The others will have lost contact with each other as well."

"So long as we have the Patterns, that shouldn't be too much of a problem," said Shatner. "And assuming the Tantibalics don't pull any last-minute…"

Small and swift flashes of orange light came suddenly from around the other side of Narodnaya, coupled with a dull thunder from outside and bursts of violent, screaming static from the radio.

"…Screw me for talking. Take us round, and send orders for ready deployment," ordered Shatner. "Take us over the south side. Get an angle of fire down into whatever the hell's happening."

The _Grant_ lurched forward, sending the people inside swaying as it tilted up towards the rise of the mountain, over towards the east side and the Tantibalic base. The sounds of battle came that much more clearly as it did so; a mix of muffled motorgun wails, the _crump_ and pound of rockets, and, much fainter, the sound of small arms fire and screams. Static from the radio reached a shrieking pitch before one of the pilots jabbed it silent.

The tension caught in Coraline's throat, and her hand clenched to the point where it became painful. Wybie reached one hand up to his helmet, a nervous gesture meant to hide nervousness, and prodded at one of his eye lenses, seemingly to fix what felt like a faulty position.

"They don't move," said Coraline quietly. "You'll break it."

"If I can break military hardware with my bare hands, you don't pay the Defence Department enough," he said, desisting. He paused, before saying, "Wait, how did you…"

The _Grant_ cleared the rise, beholding the sweep of a glacier valley leading up to the side of the mountain; a long and broad slash of silver amidst black-and-grey rock.

Crashed in the middle of the valley was the ruptured wreck of the _Jackson_, spewing flames and vomiting smoke into the sky. Bodies surrounded it, those still moving withering under a hail of fire from the mountain.

Above hovered the _Harrison_ like a beast over a wounded mate, blazing streaks of gunfire from its own wings and snout painting the air between it and the mountain white. Noise pulsed out in waves, the force of its assault all but shaking the mountain. Tiny figures rappelled down from its guts, arms in their hands adding their own firepower to that of the rocket. The _Eisenhower_ and _Taylor_ crept overhead, the first parts of their own power beginning to slam downwards.

By the mountain was the base, steel-coated and riddled with gun emplacements, lines of trenches and wires extending from it some fifty metres down the valley. Tantibalics hurried within them, tiny specks of black from the _Grant_'s perspective, directing chattering small arms fire at the soldiers on the ground, or manning gun emplacements that spat missile after missile up at the rockets, or lying still on the bloody ground.

"_How the … _Give them a taste of our own guns!" blazed Shatner. "Give the men on the ground supporting fire!"

Fire streaked out from the sides of the _Grant_, carving into the back of the Tantibalic lines and sending clouds of shrapnel and ice and blood crashing over the ground. Though caught by surprise, the Tantibalics still quickly sent answering missiles streaking up towards the rocket, but too few to get past the turret defences that sniped them out of the air. Explosions ripped through the air below them, congealing together with the rising smoke and screams.

Shell and round met in mid-air, sending flames cascading over those parts of the valley that weren't already fields of scorched charnel. Missiles ripped open vents in the base, red flowers peeling back glistening steel petals in the side. Answering fire punched open several scattered holes in the rockets. Soldiers hurrying forward from both sides, both Tantibalics and the decimated contingent of the _Jackson_, fell in swathes of motorgun fire and were tossed aside by the crash of landing rockets. Groups met in the middle, frenziedly ripping into each other with small arms and blades.

Smoke peeling aside from the clouds above the base revealed what brought down the _Jackson_, and Coraline balked as she recognised it for one of the items taken from Massachusetts, one of the items that had betrayed the base in the first place.

The electron lance, a bulky weapon coming to a needle-thin point, was angled by its crew of three up at the _Eisenhower_, and a barked command unleashed it once again.

The _Eisenhower_, blazing from its automated weapons and slowly coming to a directed hover over the battlefield, suddenly froze. The lights from its cockpit fell dim. Gravity reasserted itself, and the ponderous mass of its hundreds of tons began to fall. Missiles flew past the dormant turret systems and buckled into the hull and wings, sending metal and fire and screaming soldiers plummeting to the ice.

"There!" bellowed Shatner. "Take out the lance! By the second-right emplacement, there!"

A quick override by a pilot sent the combined arms of one wing tearing down towards the electron lance, annihilating the Tantibalics around it and blasting the weapon itself into molten pieces. The shock spread throughout the Tantibalic lines, already buckling under the weight of fire from all sides.

The _Eisenhower_ continued falling, the engines reactivating too late to do any good, and the force of its impact shook the valley and buckled the rocket across the middle, flames gouting up from the cracks splintering across its plating. Emergency ramps fell outwards, releasing scrambling soldiers who fell into the enfilading fire of the remaining Tantibalic motorguns.

Coraline looked away, sickened.

"Let rip with both wings into their lines," said Shatner, his voice subdued and falling towards an eerie calm. "Right now … right now, it's down to numbers. It's always about numbers. We've taken away the lance, and we're hurting them faster than they can hurt us now. Keep firing."

For all she looked away, the noise still carried through.

* * *

><p>Three minutes later, it was over on the outside.<p>

The wreck of the _Jackson_ and the bleeding _Eisenhower_ had yielded eighty-four dead combined, rising to a hundred and eleven once the casualties from rappelled troops had been figured in. Over a hundred and fifty Tantibalic corpses had thus far been counted.

When the _Grant_ alighted, unloading its own untouched contingent to have the honour of sweeping the base for survivors and to locate the Sur-real entrance within, the bodies and assorted fragments had been largely shifted to one side. Their impact remained. Rivulets ran down the sloping valley; of molten water, of dirt, oil, casings, blood. Too much blood.

The biggest lie ever told, from Coraline's perspective at that moment as she landed on her feet at the end of a rope, was that the dead tended to look peaceful. They didn't. They looked however they were at the moment of death, and the bodies from either side she could see, those who had had helmets knocked free and had a recognisable face remaining, had died in pain and terror.

And there was something that had _fed_ on that.

Something inside the mountain.

Something she was going to _kill_, before the day was done, for this and for all its crimes.

She let that anger fill her, build inside her, kindle something cold and merciless that could and would endure and do anything.

It was that or break down.

"Gently, gently, keep it upright. No, these things don't explode if they just fall over or hit the ground, but let's not be the one-in-a-million exception."

Wybie, by the sounds of it, was distracting himself by directing the unloading of the ferrobomb, currently descending in a cradle of cables.

"Upright! Keep it upright!"

Coraline decided to let him have fun with that, and bided her time. The mountains around them were a decent enough distraction.

Ten minutes and seventeen casualties later, the contingent of the _Grant_ finished their sweep of the base inside the mountain, and returned bearing stretchers, some carefully covered.

"They'd expanded natural tunnels in the rock, and past a few areas where they'd set up a barracks and communal area, they'd riddled them with every nasty trap in the books and then some. Mines, tripwire bombs, pressure flamers and gas doses," reported Shatner. "But we cleared them of any remaining Tantibalics, and cleared a pathway to its doorway to the Sur-real."

"You're sure it was the doorway?"

"Quite sure. It was the only one found at the end of the tunnels, and it came complete with a key in the lock."

"Is the team ready?"

"They're locked and loaded. The guncutter for your evacuation's also on standby."

"We'll move in as soon as you're clear."

Leaving the rest of the Rocket Regiment near somewhere soon to fall within the radius of a nuclear explosion wasn't something that would be commonly regarded as a sterling idea. The bulk of the strike force would evacuate the way they'd come in as soon as possible, and the team going in to place the ferrobomb would make their exit via a light guncutter, previously stored in the cargo compartment of the _Taylor_. The team in question, eight elites amongst the relatively elite regiment, were waiting beside Wybie as he ushered down the ferrobomb.

Eventually, it hit the ground without any sort of cataclysmic explosion happening at all; and Wybie took one of the handles of the lightweight handcart in which the ferrobomb was strapped, a corporal taking the other.

"Shall we head in, ma'am?" asked the squad sergeant, as the rockets began to take flight with the sound of a growing thunderstorm.

"Let's," she replied, turning to the gutted base and drawing out her shotgun, cracking it open and thumbing ferroshot from her pocket into it. "Let's end this."

* * *

><p>Before they passed through the twisted lumps of half-melted steel that used to be serviceable entryways, the world still whispered around them. Wind cut a thin whistle through the mountains, and there could be heard the diminishing rumble of the rocket engines.<p>

Past the gates, all that sounded was their footsteps, echoing in dead air.

The base, still partially lit by what remained of its own lighting system and the flashlights attached to the team's rifles, clearly bore the scars of battle. No retrieval had been given to the bodies of the Tantibalics inside the mountain, and they lay slumped, singly or in groups, in their entirety or in fragments, around chokepoints and in armouries and in dormitories.

From the latter, Coraline could glimpse what looked like overturned tables, spilling white card and books and strange, abstract images across the blood-stained floors. They seemed almost like broken shrines, dedicated to Tantibus.

A book lay in one of the corridors amidst a cloud of tattered paper, next to a black-armoured figure who almost seemed to be sleeping, and when she stooped to pick the book up and examine it, she found it filled from beginning to end with near-incomprehensible paragraphs of handwritten text.

…_cant fight it cant fight it screaming nothing pinprick fighting nothing against what it wills and mocks as fighting and cant and it sees and burns and burns and cant fight it cant will kill quickly fear for no other sake will die maybe soon and others cant fight for nothing we saw example of captain torn open and left while it gave orders again and please…_

She put it down, gently resting it in one of the body's outspread hands, and moved on with the others. Their united flashlights cut trails through the gloom, revealing a path for the benefit of Wybie and the corporal heaving along the ferrobomb.

The orderly, expanded corridors that played host to the Tendency twisted away eventually in favour of more natural tunnels riddled from the movement of the mountain itself over long aeons. Passage grew harder, and what the Tendency had done to try and make the journey easier couldn't stop the journey being long and hard. The corporal on the ferrobomb rotated out, Wybie was only coaxed away with difficulty.

The tunnels narrowed and ran downwards, for long enough to make Coraline start worrying about an evacuation time for the others. It was at least a practical thing to worry about. Here, in the mountain, nothing grew. Nothing lived. Nothing breathed, and every nook and cranny and recess in the twisting stone held nothing but dark emptiness.

At least, all those that they checked.

Eventually, they came to a door, at the end of the long stretch of tunnel.

A simple piece of dark and unadorned wood, pitted with age and set into the wall with stone hinges on one side, sat in the dark wall. A lock below a plain handle, already complete with a protruding dark metal key, was the only thing distinctive about it.

Coraline checked behind her, at the team of ferroshot-armed soldiers waiting for her to make the first move, at Wybie fussing over the ferrobomb, and made the offer.

"I have the means to finish this myself along with the First Gentleman," she said. "The creature we're about to face is more dangerous than anything anyone's challenged before, and I cannot guarantee anyone's survival if they throw themselves in here. Go back to the guncutter…"

The soldiers looked slightly affronted.

"Beg pardon, ma'am, but we wouldn't have signed up for the assault-and-sabotage specialists in the regiment specialising in rapid missions deploying from big gas-spewing rockets if mere _survival_ was a priority," interjected one of the privates. It earned him a snapped sound-off from the sergeant, but no disagreement was heard.

There, she'd made the offer, and now whatever came of the next moments, they would have chosen it. It was out of her hands, and up to the capricious whims of fate and individual skill.

Besides, with all the blood spilt so far by Tantibus, (whispered a cowardly, rationalising part of her) would a few more brave souls in its lair be much beyond a few drops in an ocean?

Each one of them is an ocean's worth. So was everyone (whispered the part of her that kept her honest).

And they're volunteering to stop anyone else falling, no matter the coat to them. You should know about that. Take them up on that as well if it helps stop Tantibus (whispered the part that kept her practical).

She turned to the door, strangely small for all that it would hold, and turned the handle.

* * *

><p>Through the door, there was a corridor that ran forward for maybe ten metres, perfectly horizontal, perfectly plain, perfectly dark. It stank of the Sur-real. The air tasted heavy and rank.<p>

At the end of that corridor, there was an arched portal, beyond which lay a room.

Coraline stepped through, the others close behind her and fanning out as they emerged.

The room was larger by far than anything Coraline had seen, in her own world or in any Sur-real lair. Seemingly oval-shaped, the room ran on for a length that would put a stadium to shame, ending at a point made by the curving walls and opposite to their own doorway. The ceiling rose to a height that demanded a painful crick from the neck to properly take in, and didn't seem so much to stop as slowly melt into shadow. A dull and dirty light came from nowhere, barely enough for the group to see by without their flashlights, which were now flickering in the midst of the Sur-real.

The walls on either side seemed to be made from the same rough-hewn stone as the floor beneath them as well, but were marked out by a strange pattern running across them. It took Coraline a moment to make out what it was, and that she only realised when she glanced to her left and recoiled from what was there.

From the wall, a twisted human torso carved of dark stone emerged, their arms clutching at empty air and their disturbingly lifelike face wearing an expression of naked terror. In the midst of their head, a glistening grey marble was set, smoke swimming inside it.

Behind it, another statue seemed to be trying to tear itself free from the wall, set in its frozen pose forever and bearing its own marble. Above that one and behind it as well, others became evident.

There were hundreds – thousands – more, most likely, in this part of the room closest to them, running across the walls and chasing up towards the ceiling, the statue-bodies of men, women, children, young, old, even scattered psychephages. All bearing the marbles. All bearing souls, glistening as _something_ fed continuously from them. All locked forever in terror.

Coraline swallowed, and forced herself to turn towards the centre of the chamber.

There was no obvious place for a discrete ferrobomb, nowhere that would hide it (if that were even possible from a psychephage in residence). They could have had a good chance of getting away in time, if that had been so. But now …

…Now, she'd have to balance the possibilities of their running speed back through the treacherous stretch of tunnels and back up to the waiting guncutter, of Tantibus interfering with the ferrobomb, of Tantibus forcing a confrontation.

Which it should have already done, for that matter.

Shadows, thick and unmoving, lay behind the countless statues, in equally countless and complex patterns of dark arms, legs, and snaking tendrils. The glare and movement of flashlights made them twitch and shiver, made what seemed like a whisper run through the room.

The soldiers, in their scattered clumps, were automatically on guard as a matter of course, but the still nothingness around them made them almost jittery. Coraline found herself on edge as well, and she scanned the shadows, looking for anything suspicious, anything that shouldn't have been there.

"Wybie?" she ventured.

"Yes?" he replied, standing with a guarding hand atop the ferrobomb.

"Take that thing over here, and set…"

There was a creak and a sigh to her right, and she turned, her shotgun levelled.

One of the soldiers, standing by himself, slowly pitched forward, his helmeted head twisted around to an angle just beyond impossible to live through. He hit the ground with a clatter, and everyone hurled themselves around to face his body, weapons instantly at the ready.

That was when it hit Coraline.

There was no such thing as a critical shadow here.

Here, there wasn't any light. Only degrees of shadow.

_And they were surrounded on all sides._

"MAN DOW…" one of the soldiers in a cluster of three started screaming, before the darkness knotted together behind them, white points opening amidst the threads and obsidian-dark claws snatching hold of them, pinning their arms against their sides effortlessly.

Tantibus rose, keeping a hold of the soldier, while the others turned and started shouted, screaming, and firing shots that were only sporadic for fear of hitting their teammate.

White teeth glistened, eyes as pale as bone fixed on the group, and a voice deeper than ocean trenches spoke, rich with an undercurrent of malevolent amusement.

"I imagined some challenge would be presented in time. But I cannot pretend awe. Tell me, humans … Here, at last, in the darkness, what do you see?"

The soldier was jerked around in the psychephage's grasp to face it head-on, their weapon falling from their hands to the ground and their legs kicking at the air futilely.

"_I_ see … chattel," Tantibus murmured. "I see nothing but the apes of old, waving iron weaponry as they once waved sticks, ever ignorant of their place."

A black claw snaked across the soldier's helmet, redoubling their gasping and efforts to break free. The soldiers on the ground shouted of their own accord, their weapons readied. Coraline dashed forward, seeking a good firing angle with her shotgun. Tatibus ignored them, tapping the shadow-formed claw against the soldier's helmet.

"I see nothing that will harm me in this place, of all places. I see only the delusions of those rotted inside out with fear."

It held the man and claw still in mid-air for but a moment – and then dashed out with a resounding crack and scream and spray of blood, from where it had cut right across the helmet's eye lenses.

Another strike, swift on the heels of the first, tore away the bottom half of the helmet in another red gout, carrying away with it a tongue.

The tendrils in which the broken, choking, blinded soldier were held rose, briefly-

"I. See. _Prey_."

And the tendril snapped down, and the soldier fell with four snapped limbs, and the air spilt with the scream and light of gunfire, and Tantibus sprang into the battle.

Coraline dived right at the bounding creature, which took form as it struck up dust from the ground beside her into something coiled and beclawed, and her shotgun blast tore the air scant inches from its head with the sound of thunder as it dived to one side. She rolled to avoid a last swipe it sent at her, all the old battle-reflexes coming back to her with a vengeance in the heated moment. She landed, came to a crouch, and span to track it with the shotgun.

Tantibus broke off away from her, making for another trio of soldiers. It uncoiled and leapt into them, skirting just over the streams of their own ferroshot, claws flashing and tearing amidst yells and blood. Hasty ferroshot rattled into one of the soldiers to a resounding curse from the sergeant on the far right, and the other two vanished beneath blindingly fast slashes that left them jerking corpses on the ground in less than an instant.

And then it moved again, lunging for the sergeant as the racket of the room redoubled, as it cut free more blood and more screams. Coraline, cursing the creature's speed, loosed another round from the shotgun, slashing lines of flapping white fire from the edge of its form.

"Timer!" she shouted, making Wybie's attention had been caught. "Fi – five minutes! Now!"

Wybie, standing with pistol drawn by the ferrobomb, still near the room's entrance, didn't hesitate. He knelt right down, and yanked open a control panel on the device's side.

It hissed at the pain, and turned to face the source, teeth curving into a smile as it sighted Coraline.

"You should have prayed to have been forgotten, Stormcrow," it said, sliding off the body of the sergeant, and rippling backwards-jointed legs from its torso as it bounded towards Coraline, teeth growing into rows of angled canines and eyes becoming angled slits of light.

She prepared to fire the gun again in the scant seconds she realised she had left – and cried out when one of the soldiers let rip into it as it charged, blasting its side open with a sustained round of ferroshot. Tantibus was knocked to one side by the sheer force of the shot, claws scrabbling for purchase as it yowled, eyes flickering as it sought for the source of its new pain.

The psychephage found the cause, its eyes narrowing, and it blurred out, darkness overwhelming a new flash of ferroshot from the soldier and evading the next blast from Coraline's shotgun. The soldier barely had time to scream before their life was torn from them.

The two soldiers behind them started forward, iron knives affixed as bayonets, but Tantibus was angered enough to feel _playful_. The guns were caught by seizing claws just behind the bayonets as they descended, and hurled away. The same claws grabbed out, seizing hold of the soldiers' heads, and slammed them into each other.

Shadows curdled around the pair, and reinforced ceramic moulded forcefully into the other, and Tantibus finished the movement with one violent push and scuttled away from the soldiers.

Their heads had been twisted together, moulded into one another, leaving them swaying and conjoined and gasping. One of them started screaming like nothing human. The other buckled to their knees, dragging the screamer down with them, and started retching, red beginning to fill the blue lenses of the enclosed helmet.

Another of the remaining soldiers started wailing with appalled terror – they had sworn to fight the fear-eater to any end, but not _this_ end. Tantibus turned to them at the sound, smiled, and leapt right up into the air, ferroshot stitching after its wake until it vanished amidst the upper darkness.

The team squinted up into the ceiling, weapons trying to train on whatever sign there could be of the monster; while one of them hurried over to the conjoined pair, to see what futile help they could offer, and, failing that, what swift mercy they could grant.

They never got that far. A black tendril cut down from the wall and sent them staggering before they collapsed, blood welling from a slit throat. Tantibus descended again, following the blood, moth-like wings carrying it down.

It was smoke. It was shadow. It was something insubstantial that cut a path through arcing blood and shrieks, that bled white fire and blazed with gleeful fury.

Coraline caught it in a blast twice, and each time saw it almost literally melt away to scrape past the worst of the damage. Only white sparks answered her, and she once had to dive away from one snaking claw that still left a welter of blood running down the backs of her legs.

And as one more shriek resounded, she pushed herself up, and realised with a numb shock that the squad had been cut apart.

Wybie still stood by the ferrobomb, though the several shots he'd pitched in hadn't been fast enough to catch the psychephage. He stood tensed and ready to rush into close quarters if needed. The conjoined soldiers were still slumped, one still and silent, while the one that had been screaming had fallen into a slowing sobbing. The soldier that had first been taken apart by Tantibus was by the other wall, far from Coraline's own position, and was, by some ghastly miracle, still alive.

But not for much longer, for Tantibus alighted next to them with a whisper of air, and had a grey nose pulled tight around their throat before Coraline could blink. They struggled weakly, only able to muster choking in their defence, and the noose slid tight and they twitched only once before falling still. The white scars across the psychephage began to fade, and it rose, trembling with the rush of renewed energy.

Tantibus looked up from them, and glanced between Coraline and Wybie, its gaze sliding right over the ferrobomb which it didn't seem to understand or care about.

Coraline stood up to her full height, desperate to not let her adrenaline fall away, and discharged one deafeningly load shot into the air, a bark of challenge that made sure Tantibus's attention fell on her.

Its eyes narrowed contemptuously.

"Your warriors have fallen. What more do you imagine you can do save drive a knife into your peoples' hearts when you fall?"

"More than you think," hissed Coraline, looking at the monster and away from the carnage covering the floor. "This time, you're where I want you."

"Such presumption," purred Tantibus, its face now most closely resembling a horse's skull, its body that of some huge barbed insect. White fire flickered within hollow pits. "Maybe I _shall_ keep you alive, after this is done."

Coraline didn't answer.

She swung her shotgun in her grasp, seizing it by the barrel in her left hand and leaning the iron-shod stock against her shoulder, ready to be brought down. Her right hand snaked down towards the trench knife, and held it reversed as she shifted her legs into a wide stance. Knees bent, weight on forward leg, ready to lunge, ready to _kill_.

Blood pounded in her skull, and darkness swam before her vision as she kept her enemy in her sights.

With one cry, one furious exhortation that gave wings to her charge, she hurled herself at the fear-eater.

Tantibus blinked, taken aback, and then broke into its own casual lope towards her, its body moulding into something lupine again.

They tore right at one another, ready to clash for one last time; like duelists, like fighting dogs, like lancers at the charge.


	16. Armageddon

Her enemy was a god in all but name, and even that if you delved into the mythology around them.

Her enemy could change form, could tear free souls, shatter and mould bone and flesh, murder with but a stroke, annihilate with but a breath, warp the world as was passingly convenient.

Her enemy fed on fear.

In that, at least, it had no hold on Coraline.

For as she charged, she certainly felt the petty fear that comes of an immediate threat, the basic genetic urge to flee that she couldn't reasonably fight. But that she accepted, and she acted in spite of it, and so Tantibus would have no hold on it.

The fear she would have felt for Wybie had been muted when she had turned aside Tantibus's attention; he was safe, relatively speaking, for the moment. All she needed her husband to do now was mind the ferrobomb and stay alive.

The fear she felt in case she failed, in case Tantibus went forth free to murder and slaughter and make people less than human with sheer mind-destroying terror of it … she wasn't as worried about that as she used to be. Because she was this close to seeing it destroyed. And she had a hell of a contingency plan.

She kept up the charge, shifting back into a proper stance and footwork as the distance rapidly narrowed. As the first sweep of its claw descended, she sidestepped, rapidly shifting her body to the left and bringing the trench knife in her right hand up in one swift slash, hacking halfway through the psychephage's arm and sending white fire rising in the wake of the rising blade.

Stepping forward swiftly on one leg, shifting her weight forward and giving herself momentum, the swung shotgun descended and broke down across the skull-face, buckling in black bone and setting the white eyes flaring as Tantibus screeched with pain. Taking advantage of the distraction, her knife cut through the air again, plunging in and out of its chest and drawing forth another plume of fire.

She backstepped hastily, giving herself space away from Tantibus, who likewise stalked backwards, extra arms and tendrils unfolding out of a form becoming bipedal and monstrous. Its eyes regarded her with cool, considered caution.

Heaving with exertion and adrenaline, she couldn't help but feel pleased with how well that had went. Keep that up, and she could well drag out the time until…

Tantibus struck in a blur of motion, taking fewer chances this time now that it had learned the capacity of its opponent, and sent one claw-tipped arm slashing in from her left, a thin cutting tendril whipping down from above, and held one more clawed arm tensed against its side.

She dodged the arm with the simple expediency of stepping backwards quickly, slapped the tendril out of the air as she shifted the knife to an overhead position, but was too slow to do the same to the last arm, which rammed outwards with the force of a cannon and slammed into her chest, sending her crashing backwards to the ground and sending the air rushing from her.

Dizzy and rolling on the ground, fighting to keep ahold of her weapons, she noticed glistening red, from where the strike had left punctures past the coat and armour, and flashes of white from where the psychephage's claw had been turned aside by the iron mail rings.

White that close to her, shifting in and out of her vision as she rolled, rung alarm bells too late to stop her from avoiding the leaping Tantibus, slamming her flat onto the ground again as it hurled its weight onto her head and upper body.

She cursed and grappled with the blurring, chitinous, clawing _thing_ covering her vision, gleaming teeth sliding out into long fangs that jabbed down at the coat collar and armour covering her neck. They slid past the unprotected collar and jabbed down through the armour, sending blazing waves of pain shooting up from where it drew blood. Her knife-arm was pinned, and her gun-arm jabbed the nozzle of the weapon, unwieldy with her grip around the stock, into Tantibus's side to no avail.

Thinking fast, her fingers scrabbled for the trigger, and pulled at it with her might when it was found. The crash and recoil sent the gun sliding out of her hand, and the point-blank shot sent Tantibus skidding away, white gouting from its ripped open right side.

It wasted no time, sucking in energy from the countless souls around it to heal it as it charged, and sent hooked limbs slashing down at Coraline even before she'd risen. She rolled swiftly to avoid them, sending them hammering into the rock. They were pulled free, however, when Tantibus simply seemed to scuttle over itself, drawing them back into itself with a grotesque economy of movement. It sent a limb tipped with a blade stabbing at Coraline.

She pushed herself up in a mad burst of energy to meet it, transferring her knife to her dominant left hand and rushing within its centre of attack, slapping the blade aside with her right hand as it swiftly curved inwards. Coraline's knife wove silver through the air as it slammed forwards, thrusting deep into Tantibus and carrying her to within spitting distance of it. White teeth bared, glistening just inches away from her helmet. White eyes bored into her own, trying to seek them past the lenses.

She headbutted it. Hard.

Its head jerked back, and she drew the knife out and dealt it a follow-up blow with the iron knuckleduster-handle. With one last ear-splitting shriek, it withdrew, snatching itself away amidst the broiling shadows behind it.

Coraline stood still and wheezed, fighting to regain breath while her injuries finally asserted themselves. Her chest ached like a bastard. A long and deep cut had been opened across her right hand, which was the expected outcome when you used it to slap aside a blade. Her right foot ached as well, the source of which proved to a deep stab through it as well. Had Tantibus done that during the battle, and she too high on fury to notice at the time?

She turned around, knife at the ready, her foot dragging a thin trail of red behind her as she sought for any sign of Tantibus, any glimmer of where it could have gone…

Something struck the back of her right leg, and pain exploded from it as it buckled beneath her, temporarily lost to use. Falling to that leg's knee and gasping with pain, she twisted her torso around, trying to seek from where the blow had come from.

She was suddenly struck again, the blow coming from her right, but without enough force to knock her down. Whatever power had been put into had been arrested by layers of armour and mail, and she took what force was there to help her twist aside and sweep the knife across, rewarded with a slash of white fire amidst the blurring darkness as it struck home against something. The shadows chasing across her disorientated vision pulled back, and she rose quickly and unsteadily to her feet, keeping her weight off the leg which was only now beginning to regain feeling and use.

Tantibus stood before her, just out of knifing range, in a form too tall and twisted and stretched to be called human. Its skull-like face, as dark as pitch and reflecting no light, was casually regarding a slashed-open hand from which white flared up. Dark stitching ran across the wound, and the white dimmed to a mere faint scar that grew fainter by the second.

"What strange audacity, to fight a battle that can never be won," it said, musing aloud. "You see all the power I can call upon, every last soul of your kind. And yet you resist."

The words rolled across Coraline, who swayed as she tried to maintain her stance, vision swimming as she tried to fight of fatigue. The wounds to her chest, neck, hand and foot were beginning to tell in terms of blood loss, and something in her struck leg felt wrong, as though something had been dislocated or twisted.

She had endured worse, but only rarely, and never for what would have to be an extended combat. Her knife wobbled, and she had to force herself to take a firmer grip.

She glanced round quickly at Wybie, still next to the ferrobomb. He was on one knee, one hand ready by the control panel in case something needed urgent adjustment. His other hand was on his pistol, and his gaze was on Coraline and Tantibus. She couldn't read his expression past the helmet, but she could make a guess.

Guilt rose in her, sudden and inevitable. How much had he guessed? Did he believe that this had turned into a suicide mission, that both of them would die either by the ferrobomb or by Tantibus?

If he did, he remained at his post.

The moment he saw her look at him, he rose from his feet, preparing to charge in. Her heart swelled briefly with love, and she knew she couldn't let him commit to that charge.

"No!" shouted Coraline, her rough voice carrying across the chamber and stopping him. "I've got this! I know what I'm doing!"

He had trusted her so far, but with her covered in her own blood and standing next to Tantibus, it took a colossal effort for him to her trust her in this. He did so.

Tantibus briefly flicked its head round to Wybie's position, and Coraline, acting half on a sudden desperate sense of protection and half cold-blooded tactical impulse, lunged forward. Fresh fire filled her as she dived under Tantibus's hooking hands and drove the knife upwards in its torso. White flames billowed, and Coraline took a hasty backstep, her knife's knuckleduster punching aside the followup blow.

_Yet she resisted?_ She could hardly do anything but.

_That's what you've never learned_, she thought at the creature whose blows she dodged or parried, at whom she struck and thrust and cut, knife and claws weaving ghost-trails through the air. _Thousands of years, and we've survived you. And we survived you because we fought you._

_Maybe we'll fail here. Maybe we'll die, and the ferrobomb won't trigger or you'll survive it, and you'll tear our world down and try to make us less than what we are and you'll try to rule us forever and always…_

Her knife turned aside a snatching hand, tearing it open with a burst of flame and leading her through for a upwards thrust that punched through its arm.

_But you'll fail as well._

Another of its arms grew ragged claws that tore down at her left arm, but she backstepped again, drawing her knife back. The arm continued forward though, and grabbed and tore at her right arm, white sparks spitting as Sur-real flesh met iron mail. Pain fed Coraline's killing fury, made the world crystallise to a single white-hot point, and she prepared to meet it as it stepped forward.

_Because though we might never be rid of you, we'll never stop fighting you, and you'll always be forced to challenge the better parts of what we are. _

It was, when you thought about it, simply part of its nature to be fought.

Just like there were other things about its nature to be considered as well.

There were physical rules, even in the Sur-real. Locks would buckle with sufficient force and leverage. Thread would tear when ripped at by a claw. And it was a safe bet that something like, say, a psychephage's leg, would have an underlying structure to give it form. Shapeshifting would merely change the particular structure.

Its knee was at an angle, not directly facing her. She stepped forward swiftly, putting all her weight into the falling foot, and stamped right onto the knee. The sound of snapping and an anguished hiss from Tantibus was a sweet reward.

But Tantibus, gliding to one side, wasn't truly hurt, for it could just change the structure and remove the damage. And as it curved away, faster than Coraline could turn to face it, one large and spider-like hand shot out and seized her tight, pinning her arms against her side with a huge and unyielding strength.

"Let's stop playing, shall we?" it hissed, mocking and malevolent playfulness still deep in its tone.

And the hand holding Coraline rose up with enough speed to whip her perception out of order and disorientate the world around her – and then simply threw her at the opposite wall with all its force.

She blurred through the air, reaction impossible beyond flailing and thought impossible beyond sudden shock, and she hit the wall with an audible crack, spinning down like a rag doll.

She crumpled into the ground, and lay with her limbs outspread and askew, staring blearily up at the ceiling far above.

The world was numb. She tried to process what had just happened, and what was happening right now, and when the former proved impossible once every single part of her body began registering a subtle but growing pain, she twisted her head around to seek Tantibus.

Shadows descended, and it came to a crouch in front of her.

* * *

><p>Wybie looked between Coraline and the ferrobomb, from one to the other while every part of his mind screamed at him at once.<p>

His wife was over there, no longer capable of fighting or defending herself from Tantibus.

Over here, there was a ferrobomb, the timer reading _02:27_. On it, the hope of the world rested. He had to defend it. He had to pull his own delaying action.

On the other hand, as he had just seen, that action didn't have to take place next to the ferrobomb. Heck, it was probably better, since the ferrobomb wouldn't risk being destroyed in the crossfire.

That was what a very small rational part of him said in favour of charging in. The rest of him merely internally howled with fury and sped him forwards, his right hand automatically reloading his gun and his left reaching for his own trench knife. Caution put its full force into forcing him down to a considered stalk across the room. His knife hand rose to support his gun hand at the wrist, and he prepared to put the full force of each into Tantibus's back.

"What's left to you, Stormcrow?" came the creature's voice, deep enough to echo across the lair. "No weapons. No movement. Nothing but broken plans and shattered hopes."

Coraline's body rose and fell slightly as she breathed, and one of her hands rose towards her helmet. Cracks ran across it, as with much of her visible armour.

"What's this?" Tantibus said as the arm rose. "Gazing upon an enemy's face just before they die? Save yourself the bother, you shall not die yet."

Her hand, trembling in the process, took hold of the largest segment of helmet, covering most of the front.

She said quietly, almost too quiet for Wybie to hear, "Something like that."

Then she pulled free the piece of helmet, and the other broken parts fell down around her face. Wybie came to a shocked stop, his whole body frozen.

In Coraline's left eye, where there should have been bright hazel, there was a gleaming black button, held fast with white thread.

In her right eye, which should have been covered by an eye patch, there was a pool of inky darkness.

On her right cheek, cutting down slightly towards her chin, there was golden stitching woven in the shape of script. On her left cheek, an inset star-shaped jewel glittered, red droplets beading at its edges. Across her forehead, a dark blue woad whorl ran. Just visible at the edge of her neck, a line of small multihued feathers ran downwards past her collar and armour.

She spoke again, mustering what must have been all of her strength to shout out, in a voice that all but shook the room, "ARMAGEDDON!"

Sighting Wybie out of the corner of her button-eye, she turned to him, and in words both heartfelt and swiftly spoken, said "I'm sorry. I love you. Protect the bomb."

Claws the colour of night slashed down.

Lines that cut soft lines of light into the air faded into existence before her, in the rough shape of a door, and a doorway of air opened outwards.

When Tantibus struck down, it was expecting to bring its claws upon a prone and broken human.

It wasn't expecting to be hit by thirty tons of rising coatl.

Kukulcan tore out from the open door like a vast bolt of coloured lightning, smashing into and carrying Tantibus away in a movement missed by an eyeblink. The roar of startled fury from Tantibus was drowned out by Kukulcan's own bellow. "FOR QUCUMATZ! FOR AVANYU! FOR ALL OF LOST AZTLAN! FOR THEIR BLOOD, THINE OWN!"

The two rose in a blur of colour and darkness, Tantibus twisting and growing to become Kukulcan's serpentine double, its hide of pitch darkness slamming into the coatl's own with the force of siege engines as they coiled and uncoiled and clashed, teeth snapping and tearing as they collided into the room's distant wall, raising the sound of thunder.

From the door, the Ambassador picked her way out on dainty claws. She stopped a few paces out, breathing in the air and chaos as other psychephages emerged from behind her, weaving around her form as they made for Tantibus.

Sated, she tensed, and with both hands drew out kukris, blades alive and hungry.

"We wield the might of the Harbinger herself!" she called. "Destroy the Old Terror with the New, and free the kin forevermore! At the charge!"

She lunged forwards, legs taking her in a swift scuttle along the ground at the head of a charging mass, Here a horla, claws digging gouge-marks into the stone as it loped, eyes and teeth gleaming with hunger. There a looming myrmidon, sword dragging along the ground and round shield raised high, steam whistling from every joint.

From Tantibus's body, great glistening claws sprouted like wings, and it sharply curved into the air, sending Kukulcan down and roaring in three parts. It plunged after him, tearing at his eyes and ripping the life from him, only to be descended upon by the rest of the Court the moment it hit the ground.

Wybie could only stare.

_That_ was a delaying measure.

Turning away from the howling pandemonium, he rushed to Coraline, falling to his knees beside her.

One hand went to her forehead, and when he could feel nothing past the armour, he furiously tore it off, sobbing in desperate anger as he did so.

"Hell's bloody bells, why?" he whispered as he reached out and felt a faint pulse. He knew the answer to the question, though. "For … what have you done to yourself? What'll happen when … please, don't … get up."

She remained still on the ground, her breathing faint, her face expressionless in what parts of it remained.

He turned away, and caught sight of what all this was for. The ferrobomb, ticking away to itself, the Sur-real protection on it surely being pushed to the absolute limits.

He had to keep an eye on that.

He rose to his feet, babbling "I'll get you out, I promise, I'll fix this, we'll kill Tantibus and go," as he did so. With a supreme force of effort, he turned in the direction of the bomb, and jumped back with a startled yell as something shot past his nose and bounced and skidded along the ground.

It was the Ambassador, and she brushed herself off as she rose. One of her arms hung slightly limp, and a side of her taut and skull-like face was badly bruised. "We have it on the defensive," she said to Wybie quickly. "Tell me, swiftly, what that machine is intended to do."

"It'll explode. Enough to fill this whole lair and it'll be tainted with iron." His brain, slightly overwhelmed by events, had switched to autopilot and his mouth sped ahead with the concise explanation.

"When will it do so?"

He squinted to look at the timer. "One – one and a half minutes."

She nodded. "Count it off as it goes. We will have to make a retreat lest it takes us with it."

She turned on several of her heels and sped back to the battle, while Wybie stumbled towards the ferrobomb.

Beside him, battle raged, snatches of which he caught.

The Court pressed hard from all sides, weapons blazing and cries filling the air. Knight-myrmidon and fae-seelie and spider-beldam fought side by side and as one, and those who were smashed aside with sudden and brutal injuries threw themselves back into the fight.

Tantibus was a dark nimbus at the heart of the storm, tendrils flaring and crackling and meeting every attack with a boundless fury and power of its own. Whirling, it smashed an unseelie into the ground and sent its broken body twitching, while clashing with a striking and swooping djinn; uncoiling shadows turned aside the rain of constant blows from an oncoming myrmidon and one thrust punched through the defiance-eater's armour, raining brass and steam over the battle. Teeth shot down and tore open a struggling and shrieking horla, just in time for one of several kimatines to bound forward and rip open the shadow-stuff around its mouth.

A nuckelavee galloped forward and jumped right onto Tantibus's back, the human part thrusting a rust-eaten sword deep into the shadow. The fear-eater slammed backwards into the wall, smashing the nuckelavee into a bloody smear of flesh and pus, but exposed its main form for a flurry of slashes from the Ambassador's blades. She was slapped aside with one swift swipe of an arm, but righted herself in the air and, landing on the wall with all her feet, sprung immediately off to rejoin the fight. A ragamoll lunged forward, an ornate rapier in its grasp stabbing into Tantibus's side, while an unseelie plunged onto one of the white eyes and tore at it with razor-sharp teeth.

A redoubled roar of fury shook the earth, and countless more limbs uncoiled into existence from Tantibus's side as it began hewing around itself in a storm of violence and motion, psychephages dodging or toppling apart. A wendigo, or the top half of one at least, rose itself on its arms and sprung up, rage unquenchable, claws still blurring in and out of the fire-bleeding darkness too quickly to be seen. A phylax descended on wings of shining silver, plunging down with a flaming sword and hacking free several of the shadow-limbs.

All this and more, a hundred times more, blazing across the centre of the room. Tantibus held its ground against all odds, playing lost to it now as it summoned all its strength, all of its dark hunger, more than it had ever called upon while carving out the name of the Old Terror.

"Fifty seconds!" shouted Wybie as hard as he could, hoping his voice would carry through. He looked back at Coraline, still lying slumped against the wall.

He was going to die, he knew. By shadow or in rushing fire, he would die. He had started to assume it from the moment they entered the lair.

Fine. He would do it next to her.

Starting forward and breaking into a run, he made it to her, ducking the flying remains of a todal as he did so. Bending down, he picked her up with a slight heave of effort, and hurried back her to the ferrobomb. He still had a job to do.

"…didn't see … working…" came a faint whisper from her as he pushed on through the chaos. He strained to make it out. "…Hah. All directions … cheap at price."

"Hang in there," babbled Wybie, stopping short to avoid a skidding and bellowing batragaunt. "You … you know what you've made me have to do? You're going to make me have to research _souls_, of all damn things, and how exactly they get divided…"

A new roar and a huge flash of white fire came from Tantibus; Wybie didn't bother to find out the cause.

"…And how they get _possessed_, as it were…"

The severed head of the phylax, encased in a gleamed beaked helmet, rolled by him; he stepped carefully over it.

"…And how you put them back together." He placed her body by the ferrobomb, leaning up against the wall. "Promise. I _promise_. That, ah, if we get out of here. Which, while an unlikely proposition at the moment, shouldn't be outwith the laws of probability, even if you have to measure it in decimals…"

"Time!" screamed the Ambassador, lost amidst the storm of fire and blood and blades and claws.

"Ti … Twenty seconds!" replied Wybie, looking back once more at the battle. Tantibus was deformed and broken, rupturing blossoming and phosphoric plumes from nearly every part of its many-limbed body, a mad medley of shadow and light that was still destroying, still killing. A smoke-marid vanished beneath plummeting darkness with a drawn-out scream.

"Fall back!" ordered the Ambassador, her waving blade arising above the scrum. "We fall back now! Bear the injured!"

Tantibus struck a kimatine down with a void-coloured lance, sent the body flying to knock a hotchi out of the air, and sent a tendril up in a furious slash at a hovering creature Wybie didn't have a name for, ripping it open and sending it falling in an ugly organic cascade. Psychephage bodies and torn parts littered the smashed ground, and those that still twitched or moved were being picked up by the few that could still move and fight, being tugged away out of space into rapidly-opening doors in the Sur-real air.

Wybie breathed in, thinking as best he could. He looked at the timer. Ten seconds.

Survival wasn't a remote possibility now.

So now he'd savour every moment.

_We saved the world_, he thought. _We did something worthwhile. We had fun along the way. What more can you ask for? Well, probably a few other things, but they don't fit the poetry of the moment, so they can be disrega…_

The monster of light and darkness, seeking targets still moving in its madness, saw Wybie and Coraline and the ferrobomb.

Its gaze flicked between the ferrobomb, the inscribed Coraline, the retreating psychephages, and the little red number on the black dial.

Only in madness did some things finally fall into place, and start to make sense.

Tantibus came at a charge, all else fading behind it.

Six seconds.

Wybie saw it coming, and drew and levelled his gun, snapping off a shot which vanished amidst the white inferno covering Tantibus.

The Ambassador scuttled out from behind Tantibus, her gait odd and limping but still swift.

Five seconds.

Tantibus pressed on. Wybie felt for his knife, but found nothing where it should be.

Behind him, there was the sound of someone rising.

Four seconds.

Wybie started moving, seeking to place himself between the ferrobomb and Coraline and the oncoming Tantibus, to make himself a human shield if it would buy but a single _second_…

Something tugged him back from behind, with a grasp that seemed to linger briefly, and Coraline staggered past. The Ambassador came at a full-blown run.

Three seconds.

Wybie saw the knife glinting in Coraline's grasp, which she slowly raised into a proper grip. Her limbs were broken, but something overpowering even that pressed her on now.

"_Burn_," came the insidious whisper from Tantibus. White fire filled the world, white fire and pools of shadow and two terrible, soulless eyes filled with bind hatred.

Two seconds.

Coraline lunged, knife cutting a silver trail through the air, placing herself past the ferrobomb. Wybie started forward. Again.

"_And be __**nothing**_," came the last words of Tantibus, the Old Terror, Tlaloc, La Terreur En Marche.

One second.

Tantibus's head curved forward, teeth blazing like blades in a field of fire.

The Ambassador swept past, sweeping Wybie off his feet before he could react, in a grip too strong to allow struggling, and a sharp, barked command from her opened a door in the air.

Wybie, trussed over the beldam's shoulder, grabbed out and cried out Coraline's name before the Ambassador sprung for freedom.

Coraline thrust forward, and the impact of her knife into Tantibus's forehead shuddered and stopped it in its tracks, and shook the world.

Nothing.


	17. Aftermath

The Ambassador stepped neatly through the open door into open space, the frame of which vanished and lost the lair to sight amidst the white nothingness all around. She plunged through freefall briefly, before one leg stabbed out, just so, and snagged on something unseen and immaterial and…

…with a snap and a crack that sent a lurch through the body of her passenger…

…stepped through an open doorway into a new world, which she took at a swift canter.

Wybie, his mind rebelling at the eerie lack of gravity or weight or air or sensation or so much as direction, snapped his eyes open quickly enough to drink in the sight around him. The place stank of the Sur-real.

Vertigo kicked in as he did so. The Ambassador hurried across a strand of electric-blue light in the midst of dusky indigo skies, miles of interweaving strands extending below them for what seemed like infinity. Wybie wobbled from his position across her shoulder, and was too drained and startled to act on what were perfectly good life-saving instincts, like screaming and kicking and struggling against the Ambassador's wobbly grip.

Matters weren't helped when the Ambassador, after a calculated number of steps, casually pirouetted ninety degrees on the tip of one leg on the strand, and sprang out into empty space. Before Wybie could muster any reaction before closing his eyes again, she seized for a suddenly-appearing doorway, and with a snap and a crack and a lurch…

…They bounded out onto a tree branch, from which the Ambassador sprang onto the grass-carpeted ground a few merciful feet below. Wybie opened his eyes again, taking in the thick and vibrant forest around him, the irregular and strangely-sized branches gently slapping against him as the Ambassador scuttled through the trees. Some of the trees rose only a few feet higher than Wybie, others had tops that vanished amidst low-hanging chalk-white clouds.

They emerged after a few moments in a wide and verdant clearing in the forest, in which human-sized trees gently ambled on four stubby legs. Rabbit-like things bounded amidst the grass, one of which was swiftly snapped up by a bark-coated tongue suddenly extending from an opening mouth in one of the trees.

Wybie boggled, and the Ambassador clicked the fingers of her hand, another doorway flaring to life in the air. A couple of disinterested trees watched them pass through.

This time, he was braced for the sensation, and it was markedly less unpleasant than the last two times. He even kept his eyes open for the transition, where the space between the doorways they leapt between was nothing but white in all directions.

They alighted on a storm-wracked stretch of stone, lightning arcing overhead in a smoke-black sky, making a silhouette of the colossal tower that rose before them and of the two others behind it. From somewhere past their position, there came the pounding of wind and tide, and the Sur-real air tasted of salt.

The Ambassador made for the tower and threw herself into a vertical scuttle right up the side, Wybie wincing and holding onto her for dear life as she did so. He at least got a really good view of the rocky shore below him, which was covered a split-second later by a rushing tide of water, spray hurling itself and splattering across his armour.

He recoiled from it, glancing quickly up at the expanse of dark and wild water that ran out for the miles, and the looming outline of another dark tower.

With the sound of a bell ringing, the Ambassador suddenly pulled through another door, flipping Wybie's attention right round and making his head spin as watery darkness turned to rushing and directionless white, turning immediately then to tan-coloured brick and dust.

Turning around, craning over the Ambassador's head, he saw a room, bare and abandoned, dust heavy on the wooden floor. A door led to the outside, which the Ambassador briskly passed through. The surfaces of the corridor they emerged in were seemingly made of corrugated sheets of brass, and the Ambassador's scuttling struck up the sound of metal hail.

They passed through an enlarged section of the corridor, a small room in its own right, from which half-a-dozen strange smoke-shrouded spheres hung, indistinct shapes moving within them. The Ambassador seemed to slow down, and a small smile crept across the part of her face Wybie could see.

"Sleep, grow, and cherish life in your emerging, kin-kild," she murmured softly, a note of affection in her tired voice as they passed by one of the spheres. "Weave all that is yours, and hear the songs of what we wrought today – ah, here." Cutting off her preamble, she crept up to one of the sloping walls leading into the next stretch of corridor and (while Wybie tried to observe her technique), stabbed one finger out in a blur and made a brief door out of the metal.

They stepped through, and this time, the journey seemed even shorter than before, the white less than a flash before Wybie's eyes.

They emerged in an open stretch of pale blue meadow, through which a gentle wind sent the long grass aflutter. The Ambassador stepped forward once, and then took a moment to concentrate on the door she sketched in the air.

"Entry into a lair, one which is not that of your making, is never easy," she muttered. "Even one provided."

Wybie glanced around. Hills rolled around them, patched over with meadows or low expanses of tangled forest. Wisps of clouds drifted in an golden sky, and when he turned around, he saw on a distant hill a colossal skeletal structure of brass and brick and wood, at the top of a pole as thick as a tree trunk and as tall as any skyscraper.

"And there," managed the plainly-exhausted Ambassador, stepping through the doorway, into somewhere cold and grey, through which sharp wind blew past a cracked and dull light...

Reality hit like a slap in the face to Wybie.

So did the floor.

Pushing himself up on his hands, he looked blearily around. In front of him, the pale wall ended at a sudden ragged gap to the outside, to a panorama of houses and steeples and cars and people, slowly moving in the cold and grey day without. A thin cordon of yellow tape ran around a green perimeter just outside the opening.

It was Washington DC. This was what remained of the Ambassador's Office.

Wybie twisted his body to the left, and saw the Ambassador herself leaning against one wall. She looked like she had been put through a thresher. Long cuts ran down and across her face, and several fingers on her right hand had been neatly severed. One of her legs was simply gone. Both of the kukris shoved through the belt at her waist were chipped and stained. She was breathing in deeply and arduously, but her face betrayed a quiet satisfaction.

"This place had acquired enough of a resonance," she said, half to herself.

"Wha…" started Wybie, trying to stand, and finally opting for sitting upright, his mind still awhirl. "What was all that?"

"Our world, that of it which runs parallel with your own," said the Ambassador. "Built upon a firmament of white chaos, and bled into by your world. It is traversable, but it is greatly more convenient, for those of the kin with adequate power and skill, to open doors in it, as it were." Her expression briefly broke into something like pride. "And I do not believe any others have ever run such a sequence as I did there."

Wybie slumped slightly. His mind, which at any other time would have been producing questions by the dozen with which to bombard the Ambassador, was moving through a morass, thick and dull and overwhelmed.

One thing came to mind, however. "Back there … Coraline…"

The Ambassador sighed and leaned back further. "The Stormcrow valued her world and her work highly. Highly enough to offer up all of her strength in its defence. And in case that wouldn't be enough, she offered her strength to us. Her soul became the might the Court needed to rise in open battle once more."

He managed nothing but a small "…why didn't she…"

"Tell you? For fear of hurting you. Because she felt that you might try to talk her out of it and succeed, or, worse in her eyes, maybe try and pay the price yourself. I do not know. If any would, they sit in this room."

Wybie sat there, bewildered and still with despair and a sense of betrayal.

The next sentence he managed was "What … happens to the fragments?"

"They fall to each member of the Court. Many of us fell, so many fragments will be unclaimed and free. They shall pass on to wherever your kinds' souls naturally go, albeit scattered and confused. Those which had their energy spent during the battle shall also pass on, but with less haste and along longer trails. The survivors of the battle that didn't spend them shall retain them to their own ends. Maybe we shall feed from them as we have always done, and release them when there is nothing more we can gain from them. Maybe we shall hold them as artifacts, and tell those that follow us of the two terrors that annihilated each other in the end."

She pre-empted what he would have said next. "I will not release my own piece. I appreciate that you wish me to do so, but there is greater value in it being held." Her voice grew hard. "This is my justice to the one who would have destroyed us; to remain incomplete and imprisoned for long ages. There _must_ be justice, and I will not forfeit it save for an equal value or threat."

Wybie said nothing.

The Ambassador's voice softened again. "She fell doing exactly what she intended, accomplishing precisely what she wanted. A mountain given a heart of iron and a dead fear-eater stand as her testaments. And wherever your soul shall go, it shall eventually see her own again as well, and mere time shall stand between this moment and that."

She turned painfully to the wall behind her, and slowly sketched out a rectangle, lines of softly-glowing force appearing where she traced her finger. Her movements finished, and a last door appeared.

She glanced round at Wybie. "Take your survival as my honour to our greatest opponent and greatest ally, and use it wisely. Farewell, Crow-cleven. I don't believe we shall meet again."

She pulled herself over the frame of the door, muttering, "Ach, damn this leg," and closed it gently behind her. It vanished as she went, and left pale wall behind.

Wybie sat there in battered armour, in a cold and empty room, and, still uncomprehending, slowly began to weep. His mind and all of its accompanying compassion and memory and attachment threatened to overwhelm his heart.

That of it which calculated lines and angles and poked at the edges of the box he operated in and which still functioned, instead thought about the last few minutes.

And what to do with what had been revealed in them.

* * *

><p>A month later, the ceremony was now only a memory.<p>

It had been low-key and tasteful, dedicated to President Jones and all the brave servicemen who had fallen fighting Tantibus. A small and passing mention was given to the members of the Court who had fallen, described in Wybie's report as allies who had entered through Sur-real trails to buy the ferrobomb time to go off, and who had evacuated him at the last moment.

Their price wasn't mentioned. Peace held between humanity and the psychephages, and Wybie had made a frank cost-benefit analysis of telling the unvarnished truth versus telling a lie of omission. It had paid off. Nobody's sacrifice had been diminished by the dirty details, and nobody's deserved to be.

Bernstein had been sworn in, and had his hands full overseeing the country's recovery from the days when Tantibus and the Tantibalic Tendency had struck without mercy. The country was healing, piece by piece, grief stitching healing scars where they were needed. Refugees were returning to partially-rebuilt cities, and a damaged infrastructure was being put back together. Phoenix had vowed to honour its namesake, and was doing a damn good job of it.

The situation was the same for every other country in the world. People everywhere rebuilt themselves and each other, recovered what they had had, and were already putting the once-mighty and terror-inspiring Tantibus in history's bin.

The survivors of the Tantibalic Tendency were few and far between. Many of them had died at the base, and those left had lost their minds when Tantibus had been destroyed. They were shells without thought, blameless and broken, and they were being cared for as humanely as possible.

Wybie had been reinstated as head of the Department of the Supernatural.

He had a light workload. Contact with psychephages was diminishing, many were no longer answering calls from human governments, the small rate of attempted hunts that had occurred before was on a sharp decrease, and demand for the synthesised soul-matter had greatly fallen.

This was perfectly fine, and gave him that much time for his latest and last project. He had only memory to work with, and he was aware that even that would be painfully inadequate.

But everyone had ways of dealing with grief, and this was his.

Somewhere, somehow, he'd fulfill his promise, and answer his questions. With this purpose answering his grief, the merely unknown would not be permitted to stand in his way.

* * *

><p>Six months later, the first flight arrived from the Lunar and Martian colonies, the spaceports now fully restored and capable of shifting large quantities of supplies.<p>

Wybie saw the incoming craft cutting white trails through the sky, looked up at where the moon and planet would be, briefly wondered, and then got back to work. Work which now involved very little at all; the psychephages seemed to have dropped off Earth's radar altogether in the last few months.

He didn't have much left to do. Not that there was actually much else he could do.

And a few days after that, an underworked aide knocked on the door of Wybie's workroom/office, got no reply, and entered to find it empty except for a prominent piece of paper on one suspiciously neat workstation and an Eroder on the floor.

The note read:

_I am just going outside and may be some time. Whoever finds this, tell Under-Secretary Akkineni that she's the boss now, and that I specially went to the trouble of organising all my stuff for her. Just because I'm a nice person._

_- Secretary Wyborne Lovat, United States Department of the Supernatural, Undisputed Sovereign of All that He Beholds, All-Time Highscore Champion at 'Chainsaw FighterFest 3000', Professional Asskicker and ex-First Gentleman._

_P.S. There's a full explanation of what exactly the hell I've just done in the bottom-right drawer of my workstation._

_P.P.S. The left workstation, that is._

_P.P.P.S. Assuming you entered through the door and haven't changed your facing much, that would be your right._

_P.P.P.P.S. Why did I write this thing in pen rather than pencil? I could have saved a fortune on postscripts._

_P.P.P.P.P.S. This is now the most terrible parting note in the history of parting notes, and it should feel terrible._

_P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Don't worry about putting the Eroder back in the stockpile. You won't interrupt anything now.  
><em>


	18. Crossroads

_In a room, lined with long benches and whiteboards, Wybie stood._

_His gaze was focused down at an Eroder, buzzing to life on the floor. His hands checked everything he had on his person, everything that he had prepared for what he would do next._

_Covering him, hard-wearing clothes and a long, sturdy coat. Extremes of climate seemed likely, and he had packed additional cold-resistant items. Cold would likely be the least of his problems, granted, but it would be a terribly silly one to be caught out by._

_Over his back, a pack containing, as well as clothes, about a month's supply of food and water. He didn't know what chances to restock would cross his path, assuming they existed. He would have to play that part by ear._

_It also held pens and a large pad of notepaper, one part of which was now sitting on the workstation to his left. Electronic means of taking notes would have stood a snowball's chance in hell, and he had gotten into the old-fashioned habit of physically writing in any case._

_For his own edification and that of science overall, things like a compass, an obsolete PDA, and a piece of iron and a magnet were also contained within. Physics might be all kinds of fun in the Sur-real, and it was worth finding out._

_Also therein were things that fell under basic common sense for an undertaking like this. A lighter, and flint and tinder as backup. Binoculars, A sleeping bag and rope and a utility knife and changes of underwear._

_Amongst other things, there was also a box of ferroshot for the revolver at his hip and the rifle across his back, companioned by an iron-bladed tomahawk. He would likely encounter all the psychephages he had ever encountered plus some, as well as a wildlife that included carnivorous trees. He was taking as few chances as possible, thank you very much._

_Beyond that, he had little idea of what he would need._

_Heck, he was working on effectively zero information. He might even end up breathing air that wasn't entirely adequate for humans, and end up suffocating ignominiously a couple of hours in. There were a million possible ways this could end badly, most of them unpleasant._

_But he had made a promise. And he wasn't prepared to live a life with this undone, unwilling to leave parts of someone he had loved to languish in dark places for long ages, however long a long age might be._

_For a moment, he stood there, pondering. Was he the first to ever even consider this, much less actually go ahead with it? To do something that belonged in the realm of fairytales?_

_Of course he wasn't, he mentally reminded himself, with accompanying mental dope-slap. Coraline had done the same with far less. And she and Wybie and Maria had gone on to make a habit of it._

_He had no idea what lay before him, save only a few of the broadest details. A vast and dangerous journey in an alien world to locations he wasn't even aware of, to creatures he didn't know, to strike deals which would have prices or risks he couldn't even imagine._

_A cost-benefit analysis had won over those concerns a while back, and he stayed where he was._

_He waited, and finally got a response._

_A doorway solidified out of appearing light in mid-air, and the head of a small coatl, small enough to be a mere juvenile sprung from the nest, poked around the opening door. It was curious and confused, and those states only increased when Wybie started talking._

_He spoke, and it hesitantly replied, uncertain of how this sort of increasingly-rare encounter ought to be handled. But Wybie spoke with certainty and experience, and offered nothing that seemed to present any harm to the coatl._

_It pushed the door open all the way, to a sunny day over pale green fields beyond. Past these fields, forested hills rolled across the horizon, and past these hills, the looming shapes of impossibly distant mountains._

_Wybie stepped through, still chatting to the coatl, and with a last look backwards, closed the door behind him._

_The door remained in mid-air, eventually fading away to a mere outline of light._

_The light hung, began to fade, and, to the whisper of Sur-real wind, vanished altogether._

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Afterthoughts:<br>**

**This was the longest thing as a series I've ever written for this site or any other, and saying that I had tremendous fun in the process would be a great understatement.  
><strong>

**To you, who's presumably read this far and stuck with the series, thank you. To anyone and everyone who read this, dropped reviews, sent messages and gave support, online or off, thanks are due and thoroughly deserved. Model Builder; a fellow writer on the site who gave me unflagging support from day one and who made sure my depiction of American events and names didn't fall too wildly astray of the mark, deserves especial thanks. As does Calyn, likewise a writer on the site; who generously provided, at my request, the proper scientific name in Greek for psychephages. This isn't a request that should be sanely posed to any undeserving person, and anyone who answers it deserves thanks. Thanks also goes to Woodswolf, another writer on the site, who was sufficiently inspired to create recursive fanfiction for the series. I'm reasonably sure this is the most complimentary and terrifying thing that can ever happen to anyone.  
><strong>

**Thanks goes also to Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick, for no reason that should need explanation.  
><strong>

**The Station Sequence is over and done with, but this certainly isn't the last thing I plan to write on the site. A new series, not 'Coraline'-based, should get underway sometime in the summer. And for that and other planned stories, I hope to see some of you there.  
><strong>

**- Marquis Carabas, signing off.**_  
><em>


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